Super Bowl 2025: The ads

Even the ads did not live up to the hype this year.

One of the first was a Coca-Cola ad that began with a 2025 argument over artificial intelligence and how AI was going to take over the world. Two young hotheads were engaged in this dispute, and an older woman smiles benignly at them and says, "I think we're going to be just fine."

Then we see an event in 1975 -- a memory of hers. She was then as a young woman a participant in a similar argument, except that the key word was "computers" rather than "AI".

Someone or other ar that earlier moment had apparently said, "I think we're going to be just fine" in the same benign way.

Only after all of this does one see the logo and realize that it was all a Coca-Cola commercial.

Meaning what? That "it" has been "just fine" for fifty years despite worries about digital technology because we've had coke? And it will continue to be just fine because we still have it?

Wow. I'm thirsty just thinking about this. I think I'll go get a Pepsi.

The best ad of the night? I say this without intending to express any fondness for Big Pharma or all of its works But the best ad of the night was for Pfizer. A young boy getting out of a hospital, fantasizing the cheering crowds, getting to the top of certain famous museum steps and jumping proudly like Rocky. Finally we see him at home, after a more pedestrian return from the hospital than he had imagined.

Then we hear an announcer say that Pfizer is going to kick cancer's butt.

We can always hope.

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