Top 10 Super Bowl 2020 ads

Last night at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, the 54th NFL Finals, better known as Super Bowl, was played between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs.

For fifteen years now the Super Bowl is much more than just the final of the American Football Championship, but it has become one of those events that mark American culture, thanks to this year's half time show (which was somewhat disappointing), set up by Jay-z's Roc Nation, but also thanks to the famous slew of ads that aire during the intermission. Over the years, half-time sports have almost become more important than the game itself: on a business level, they are the most important moment of American television marketing and are a cult for fans of film and television. Some of these - such as Ridley Scott's iconic 1984 Apple commercial, Coca-Cola's 1979 commercial, and the Budweiser's commercial that launched the phrase "What's up??? " - have entered the history of advertising and cinema.

This year's game - won by Kansas City - was watched by more than 110 million viewers, religiously gathered around the TVs and surrounded by nachos, pizzas and chicken wings (click here if you want to have any culinary inspiration). In the interval of the match - before and after the half time show starring Jennifer Lopez and Shakira - the ads aired, some of which had already been posted on YouTube with teasers and spin-offs since last week. This year, the brands paid about 5.6 million dollars for a 30-second advertising space, about 170,000 dollars per second; for comparison, the nightly Oscar night commercials come in at about 2.5 million dollars.

For this year's commercials, the majority of brands have focused on a funny line, using star cameos and light storytelling. Despite a few exceptions (the Kia advert, Trump's and Bloomberg's avowedly political ones) no brand has exposed itself politically on sensitive issues - such as immigration, the opioid crisis and racism - that had been widely touched on in the past few years, especially in 2016 with the election of Trump and the Nike campaign starring Colin Kaepernick.

"Creating controversy for the sake of creating controversy is not helpful for anybody. We are in a moment when positivity is something that we all need," Diego Scotti, Verizon's chief marketing officer, told Vox, explaining why the light trend in commercials. At the end of 2020, the United States will vote to re-elect or change Donald Trump to the White House, and to avoid taking sides politically is a conservative choice of brands that prefer to dodge controversial issues in which they often play an active role. just think of Big Tech, Google, Apple and Facebook) or a huge and extremely receptive audience (Nike, Tesla).

It's a theme that may seem like a simple trend but instead has to do with the perception of big corporations in contemporary culture and post-capitalism. Brands give up rehabilitating the "bad" image to avoid shitstorms on social media, boycotts or potentially harmful to business.

Better sit in front of the TV or a computer and watch the ten best commercials aired during the Super Bowl.