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The Safer Bowl: With tensions running high, Super Bowl advertisers avoid politics and play for laughs

by with No Comment Xpandfy

In a charged political climate where even small missteps can spark a brand backlash, many of this year’s Super Bowl advertisers are sticking with the safest bet in the playbook: comedy and celebrities.

Much like last year’s Super Bowl, the vast majority of the big game ads released so far are playing it safe. Advertisers hope that A-list stars will be a shortcut to attention in the crowded field of commercials, and that humor will leave audiences feeling uplifted and warm toward their brand.

“In general, advertisers want to play it safe,” said Peter Daboll, head of North America at the creative testing platform DAIVID. “There’s a high anxiety level here in the US, and people are probably very afraid of triggering anything.”

Viewers aren’t in the mood to be preached to, he added, and even heartwarming ads that might have performed well in Super Bowls past could come across as too “syrupy” and fall flat.

Of the Super Bowl LX trailers and teasers the TV measurement platform iSpot has tested with its consumer panel so far, 63% triggered “funny” reactions from viewers. The highest “funny” score right now goes to Bud Light for its “Keg” ad, which features Shane Gillis, Post Malone, and Peyton Manning flailing down a hill in an attempt to catch up with a runaway beer keg.

Other ads hoping to raise a chuckle:

  • Andy Samberg stars as “Meal Diamond” for Hellmann’s, performing a “Sweet Caroline” parody in a deli to customers, including Elle Fanning.
  • Fanatics Sportsbook tapped a self-deprecating Kendall Jenner to mock the “Kardashian Curse,” the internet conspiracy that dating members of the family ruins an athlete’s game.
  • Instacart’s vintage-style ad features actor Ben Stiller and singer Benson Boone in a high-energy— and ultimately calamitous — musical performance about choosing the perfect banana.
  • Novartis is making itself the butt of Super Bowl joke ads, with NFL players telling viewers to “relax your tight end” and get a blood test for prostate cancer.
  • Comcast’s Xfinity reunites some of the original “Jurassic Park” cast to suggest that many of the famous dinosaur park’s problems could have been avoided with better WiFi.
  • Anthropic is taking a swipe at OpenAI over its decision to bring ads to ChatGPT.
  • Even the heartwarming story of a Budweiser Clydesdale horse helping a bald eagle learn how to fly ends with a joke about getting misty-eyed.

The cast of celebrities in the commercial breaks will range from Sabrina Carpenter for Pringles to Emma Stone for Squarespace and Guy Fieri for Bosch.

Mark Gross, cofounder of the ad agency Highdive, which has produced several Super Bowl campaigns over the years, said the Hollywood landscape had changed and that celebrities are now more open to appearing in commercials than in previous years.

“It’s the job of us at ad agencies and marketers to tell great, original stories that stand out without just hiring the celebrity first and expecting that to do the work for you,” he added.

Highdive worked on a Super Bowl commercial for Lay’s this year.

Money talks

There’s a lot at stake.

The Super Bowl remains one of the last mass-reach media advertising destinations. Last year’s Super Bowl averaged a record-high US audience of 127.7 million viewers, per Nielsen, the TV ratings company.

The average price for 30 seconds of airtime during Super Bowl LX was $8 million, with some spots selling for more than $10 million, according to this year’s big game broadcaster, NBCUniversal. Then there are the millions of dollars spent on talent fees, production, and media buys to amplify the ad after the game ends.

“CMOs are under so much pressure,” said Kerry Benson, SVP of creative strategy at the data and analytics company Kantar.

“They have to prove ROI in these ads,” she said, referring to return on investment.

The rewards can be handsome if brands play their Super Bowl strategies right.

In 2024, Kantar found that Super Bowl ads delivered an average return on investment of $8.60 for every $1 spent, making them 20 times more effective than regular TV ads. Benson said this reflects the size of the audience during the game and all the supporting activity and discussion around a Super Bowl campaign.

A different approach

Not every brand is adopting the comedy-and-celebrity playbook.

Rocket and Redfin’s ad amplifies the emotion with a stirring Lady Gaga cover of Mr. Rogers’ “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” The spot leans into a moment of heightened division in many US communities, highlighting the importance of small acts of kindness and human connection.

Elsewhere, Hims & Hers’ “Rich People Live Longer” spot strikes a provocative tone about US healthcare inequality, featuring a couple of characters that resemble Jeff Bezos and the biohacker Bryan Johnson.

“When you are challenging a system that has been broken for generations, the work cannot feel familiar or safe,” said Hims & Hers chief design officer, Dan Kenger. “The creative has to feel disruptive because that’s what is needed to change the status quo of healthcare.”

Anselmo Ramos, creative chairman at the advertising agency GUT, is nostalgic for ads that didn’t lean on celebrity as a shortcut to success — Apple’s “1984,” Budweiser’s frogs, the Geico caveman, and the E-Trade baby. He’s also hoping to see more bold, anthemic spots in the sea of comedic commercials.

“I’m missing executions with a brand purpose, with a clear point of view,” Ramos said. “We need them more than ever.”

This story has been updated with additional information.




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Lloyd Lee

Why Waymo believes robotaxis must be safer than human drivers

by with No Comment Xpandfy

If people can drive with their eyes, can an AI drive only with cameras?

Tesla leans on that analogy to defend its hotly debated cameras-only approach to autonomous cars.

“It should be solved with cameras just like how every other human or animal lives around this world,” Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of AI, said at the ScaledML Conference on January 29. “Self-driving problem is thought of as a sensor problem. It’s actually not a sensor problem, it’s an AI problem.”

Alphabet’s Waymo has a fundamentally different engineering approach to autonomy. Srikanth Thirumalai, Waymo’s vice president of onboard software, pushed back on Elluswamy’s comparison.

“I think the bar is higher than human driving,” he told Business Insider.

The contrast between Waymo and Tesla goes beyond philosophy and is built into the hardware.

Tesla wants to reach autonomy with fewer than 10 cameras and an AI trained on billions of miles of real-world driving data. Waymo also relies on AI, but is paired with a multi-sensor system — 29 cameras, five lidars, and six radars — to give the AI driver different ways to perceive an environment. The Alphabet company has so far deployed about 2,500 robotaxis across multiple US cities.

The debate often boils down to cost and safety: More sensors could increase costs, which could be a barrier to scale. Fewer sensors could present safety challenges, some say, which is another constraint for mass robotaxi adoption.


Srikanth Thirumalai

Srikanth Thirumalai, Waymo’s vice president of onboard software

Lloyd Lee/BI



Thirumalai manages a team of more than 600 people building Waymo’s AI driver software. During a rare interview at Waymo’s HQ, which spans multiple buildings, the vice president told Business Insider he expects the sensor suite to shrink over time as the hardware improves and gets cheaper. But he framed the lidar or no-lidar debate as a distraction from the company’s safety-oriented objective.

“Given where the technology is right now, the question is what is it going to take for that product to be safe?” he said. “So you work backwards from that safety bar and say, ‘What does it take to build a safe product?’ And then keep pushing and iterating and innovating to reduce the cost of the sensors, and to improve the quality of the software and how it uses the sensors.”

The soft-spoken Thirumalai looked to the future and explained his position.

“In three to five years, will our sensor stack look different than it is right now? Absolutely.”

Waymo has previously said it expects the next generation of robotaxis to have fewer sensors: 13 cameras, four lidars, and six radars. A Waymo spokesperson previously told Business Insider that the company expects to serve public riders by late 2026.

A Tesla spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

How safe should a robotaxi be?

Humans can be bad drivers. They’re easily distracted, swayed by emotions, and can be slow to make the right decisions. Leaders in autonomy will say they’re driven by a mission to build something safer than humans. The challenge is defining what “safer” means in a way that regulators, riders, and engineers can measure.

“This notion of what the bar is is a very important question,” Thirumalai said. “And one that we have only refined over the years, and in some cases, we’re still sort of discovering what the bar is.”

Instead of an arbitrary goalpost that says robots will be multiple times safer than a human driver, Thirumalai said Waymo looks at individual driving cases and assesses how often those events can occur.

“We break it down and say, ‘Well, how often do those events actually occur per million miles of driving? And how serious are those events?” he said, adding that his team can then aim for a lower incident rate.

Thirumalai and even Waymo’s top brass aren’t selling perfection. A human fatality caused by a robotaxi isn’t a matter of if but when, Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana has said.

Reports and videos shared across social media have shown that AVs can make mistakes, whether in school zones, emergency response scenes, bad weather, or even seemingly ordinary driving scenarios.

“People might say, ‘Hey, look, this is AI. We never want it to make a mistake.’ That is an unachievable bar,” Thirumalai said.




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