The best and worst 2019 Super Bowl commercials

Last night at the Mercedes Benz Arena in Atlanta the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams battled for the 53rd Super Bowl - but for those like me who doesn't care about the game - yesterday was all about the commercials.
For the past fifteen years the Super Bowl has been much more than just the final game of the American Football championship, it has become one of the pivotal events of the American culture, mainly due to half-time shows and half-time commercials. Some of these, like the iconic 1984 Apple commercial shot by Ridley Scott, the 1979 Coca-cola commercial and the Budweiser advertising that launched the phrase "What's up ???", have entered the history of marketing and television.

This year's game was witnessed by more than 110 million Americans, religiously gathered around TV and surrounded by nachos, pizzas and chicken wings (here if you want to have some culinary inspiration). The Super Bowl was rather subdued: the game was bad and slow (the Patriots won the lowest score in the history of the SB), the half-time show starring Maroon 5 and Travis Scott did not impress anyone and more generally the NFL carries the aftermath of political talks raised by Colin Kaepernick two years ago and not yet resolved.

Even for advertising it was not a great year, despite the brands that bought 30 seconds of adv-space have spent more than 5.25 million dollars, about 170K per second. To give you a yardstick, the spots during the Oscar night come to around 2.5 million dollars.
There were few original commercials, pop culture and revival (with Nostalgia is never wrong) while less political and emotional messages were involved. Even from the cinematographic point of view, nothing made us jump on the couch. The products have always gone into the background, in favor of a narration on the producer brand and more or less successful mashups of pop culture.
According to Vox, there are two main reasons that explain this trend: the first one is that the public is no longer used to looking at the TV adv and brands to produce them, when they do they hope more in online amplification than in hitting the viewer; the second one is the difficulty of capitalism and big corporations - most of the commercials have been produced by Big Tech - to tell their own image in 2019, in a growing climate of skepticism and lack of enthusiasm towards the future, which have endorsed the brands and advertising agencies to safe and tested pop products.

Like last year, we offer you a selection of the best and worst advertisements seen this year.