Obviously the winner was the NFL’s two-minute celebration of its own 100th anniversary, the commercial equivalent of an all-star movie and directed by Hollywood’s Peter Berg. What a pleasure it was to see stars from different eras all the way back to Jim Brown, Paul Warfield, Larry Csonka and Dick Butkus and all the way forward to Joe Montana, Barry Sanders, Mike Singletary, Deion Sanders, Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Odell Beckham Jr., Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady, with the winner of the spot being Franco Harris spoofing his own “Immaculate Reception” of 1972 back at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Truly one of the best Super Bowl commercials of all time, and for a product we actually like. The unstated subtext was, I think, “Not all of our old guys have brain damage.”
Other winners were the Bud Light spot that turned into a Game of Thrones teaser; Hyundai’s Jason Bateman-starring “Elevator;” and the Amazon ad in which Harrison Ford’s dog keeps ordering food via Alexa, which winds up causing a global power outage to the tune of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.”
Honorable mention to a real-time tweet: as the low-scoring puntathon dragged on, resulting in the lowest final score of all time, the Mercedes-Benz Twitter account published this one-liner: “If this game wasn’t in my stadium, I would have driven away by now.” The post was subsequently deleted.