Super Bowl LX and the Rise of AI-Generated Advertising

According to ad measurement firm iSpot, 15 out of 66 commercials during Super Bowl LX featured AI in some way. That’s 23% of the broadcast. But the important distinction most coverage is missing is this: there is a significant difference between companies advertising AI products and companies using AI to make the ads themselves. Both happened on Sunday night, and the second category is the one that should have your attention.

The so-called “AI Bowl” was loud, polarizing, and at times confusing. Viewers took to social media within the first quarter to express fatigue. But beneath the noise, a handful of advertisers did something genuinely new: they used generative AI as a core production tool, not a talking point. That shift has real implications for how brands approach creative production, and for how marketers should think about the relationship between AI tools and brand storytelling going forward.

Two Very Different Categories of “AI Ads”

It helps to separate what happened on Sunday into two buckets.

The first bucket is straightforward. Major AI companies bought Super Bowl airtime to promote their products to a mass consumer audience. OpenAI ran spots for Codex. Anthropic aired multiple ads for Claude, taking a pointed jab at OpenAI’s plans to introduce advertising into ChatGPT. Google promoted Gemini. Amazon introduced Alexa+. Meta showcased its Oakley-branded AI glasses. Startups like GenSpark, Base44, and ai.com made their Super Bowl debuts. This is traditional advertising. Big companies spending $8 to $10 million per 30-second slot to build awareness. Worth discussing, but not what this post is about.

The second bucket is more interesting. A smaller group of brands used AI not as the product being sold, but as the production method behind the commercial itself. This is the category where advertising as an industry starts to feel different. These are the ads worth examining closely.

The Ads That Were Actually Made With AI

Svedka: “Shake Your Bots Off”

AI Production Partner: Silverside AI

Svedka’s parent company, Sazerac, positioned this 30-second spot as the first “primarily” AI-generated national Super Bowl commercial. The ad features the brand’s retired robot mascot, Fembot, alongside a new character called Brobot, dancing at a party set to a remix of Rick James’ “Super Freak.”

The production was handled in partnership with Silverside AI, the same firm behind Coca-Cola’s controversial AI-generated holiday commercial in late 2024. According to The Wall Street Journal, the process took roughly four months, with significant effort spent training the AI to replicate convincing facial expressions and body movement.

What’s worth noting is how carefully Sazerac framed the human involvement. Chief Marketing Officer Sara Saunders emphasized that every piece of the ad was “hand-held and art-directed,” positioning AI as an animation tool rather than a replacement for creative direction. The storyline, character concepts, and even some of the dance choreography (sourced from a TikTok contest won by a 23-year-old Nashville resident) were human-driven. The original Fembot character files no longer existed, which is reportedly what made AI reconstruction a practical necessity rather than a stylistic choice.

Viewer reception was mixed. iSpot reported that the ad registered a brand match of just 7%, far below the alcoholic beverage industry norm of 63%. Common audience signals included “weird,” “surreal,” and “WTF.” The ad got people talking, but not necessarily about vodka.

Artlist: AI-Produced in Five Days for Under $5,000

AI Production Tools: Artlist AI Toolkit

If Svedka’s ad represented the high-effort end of AI commercial production, Artlist represented the opposite extreme. The AI video platform produced its entire 30-second Super Bowl spot in five days, for a reported cost of less than $5,000.

Artlist’s in-house team conceived, produced, and finalized the ad using the company’s own AI tools. The creative approach was deliberately meta: the spot parodies other 2026 Super Bowl commercials that had already been released, including visual nods to Pepsi’s polar bear moment, Budweiser’s Clydesdale narrative, and others. By referencing ads that had just aired, Artlist created a built-in proof point. If these visuals were generated in under a week, the timeline speaks for itself.

This is a regional spot, not a national buy, which matters for context. But the production economics are the real story. Traditional Super Bowl commercial production budgets typically run well into seven figures before you even account for the media buy. Artlist reportedly spent less than most brands spend on a single day of a standard shoot.

Xfinity: AI De-Aging the Jurassic Park Cast

AI Tools: De-aging / visual effects technology (specific platform not disclosed)

Xfinity’s Super Bowl debut took a different approach to AI in production. Rather than generating entire scenes, the ad used AI-powered de-aging technology to make the original Jurassic Park cast (Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Sam Neill) appear as they did in the 1993 film. The creative concept imagines what would have happened if Jurassic Park had Xfinity’s internet service, showing the characters jogging with dinosaurs and posing for photos with a T. rex instead of running for their lives.

Directed by Taika Waititi and created with Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the ad blends traditional high-production-value filmmaking with AI-assisted visual effects. Reports indicate that many viewers couldn’t tell AI de-aging had been used until they were told, which is a meaningful data point about where these tools currently sit on the quality spectrum.

Hims & Hers: AI in Creative Exploration

AI Tools Used in Pre-Production: Google Gemini, OpenAI Sora, NanoBanana

Hims & Hers took a more restrained approach. According to Chief Design Officer Dan Kenger, the company used tools including Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s Sora, and NanoBanana during the creative exploration phase to develop the ad’s concept, script, and visual direction. The key distinction: none of these AI tools were used in the final production of the spot itself.

The ad, developed in collaboration with the creative studio Ways & Means, uses surreal imagery and a voiceover from Common to argue that healthcare access shouldn’t be determined by wealth. The AI involvement was limited to the ideation and concepting stage, essentially using generative tools to rapidly prototype visual ideas before committing to traditional production methods.

This is arguably the most common way AI is actually being used in advertising production right now, and it’s worth paying attention to precisely because it’s less dramatic than a fully AI-generated spot. Many agencies and in-house creative teams are incorporating AI into pre-production workflows without disclosing it or making it part of the narrative.

What the “AI Bowl” Comparison to the “Crypto Bowl” Gets Right and Wrong

Several commentators have drawn a direct line between the 2026 AI Bowl and the 2022 “Crypto Bowl,” when cryptocurrency companies dominated the Super Bowl ad landscape. The crypto firms that advertised that year included FTX, which collapsed spectacularly later that same year. The implication is that a glut of Super Bowl ads from a single sector signals a bubble nearing its peak.

There’s a surface-level pattern worth acknowledging. Both represent emerging technology sectors spending aggressively on mass-market awareness at a moment of investor anxiety. And iSpot data suggests that AI companies likely spent more than double what crypto firms did in 2022.

But the comparison breaks down on a fundamental level. Cryptocurrency companies were advertising financial products that required consumers to buy in. AI companies, for the most part, are advertising tools that augment existing work. The products being pitched on Sunday, whether coding assistants, image generators, or smart home systems, are integration plays. They’re designed to layer into workflows people already have. That’s a materially different value proposition than asking someone to invest their savings in a volatile digital asset.

The more relevant observation is not whether AI is in a bubble, but whether the companies buying these ads have a clear message for the people watching. On that front, the results were uneven.

What This Means for Marketing Teams

The production side of the AI Bowl carries practical implications that are more interesting than the brand messaging wars.

The production cost floor is dropping. Artlist produced a broadcast-quality spot for under $5,000 in five days. That number will not stay exceptional. Even if the quality of fully AI-generated spots hasn’t yet reached the emotional resonance of traditional production, the gap is closing and the economics are not subtle.

The disclosure question is real and unsettled. Some brands, like Svedka and Artlist, leaned into their AI production methods as part of the marketing narrative. Others, like Xfinity, used AI tools without foregrounding them. And industry estimates suggest that half or more of Super Bowl spots used generative AI in some capacity during pre-production. There is no current standard for disclosure, and audiences appear to respond negatively when AI production quality falls into the uncanny valley but not when the tools are invisible.

Human creative direction still determines outcomes. The most consistent throughline across the AI-produced ads is that the ones with clear, human-driven creative strategy performed better than the ones where the AI itself was the story. Svedka’s low brand-match score is a cautionary example. Xfinity’s warm reception is the counterpoint. The tool is not the strategy.

AI in pre-production is already widespread and will become standard. Hims & Hers’ use of Gemini and Sora in the concepting phase is probably the most representative example of how AI is being adopted in creative departments right now. It’s faster iteration on ideas, not replacement of the production pipeline. This is less dramatic and less visible, which is exactly why it will become the default.

Where This Is Heading

Super Bowl LX was not the moment AI-generated advertising arrived. It was the moment AI-generated advertising became visible enough to scrutinize. The quality is uneven. The audience reception is mixed. The economic implications are significant.

For marketers and brand leaders watching this space, the useful takeaway is not whether AI ads are good or bad. It’s that the production economics of video content are shifting in ways that change the calculus of what’s possible for teams of all sizes. The brands that will benefit most are the ones treating AI as an expansion of their creative toolkit, not as a substitute for having something worth saying. The Super Bowl, for all its spectacle, made that distinction very clear.