Super Bowl Alert: That’s a wrap

Good afternoon Super Bowl junkies, I’m Jeanine Poggi, Ad Age’s assistant managing editor, here with the final edition of our Super Bowl Alert in 2021.

Business as usual … ish

For the most part, despite the turmoil from the pandemic, Super Bowl commercials went on as usual.

Super Bowl brands navigated the challenges of producing often epic spots during the pandemic, largely generating ads that exist in an alternate, pandemic-free universe, according to Ad Age Editor-at-Large Simon Dumenco in his review of all the Big Game commercials.

The ads were stocked with scenes of people hanging out with nary a concern about social-distancing, masking or self-isolating, Dumenco writes. Whether they succeeded or not creatively, it’s clear that advertisers mostly wanted us to forget our troubles—the pandemic, global recession and the political divide.

Of course, there were exceptions.