“Humor is back and it’s come back loaded”…”Nostalgia is also at hand”…”Diversity is now organic and not forced”…”There are generally more celebrities than ideas”…”Crypto, crypto, crypto” were the main trends that Flor Leibaschoff, founder and CCO of Beautiful Beast; Luciano “Chany” D’Amelio, VP of Creative Services at Ogilvy Miami; Javier Osorio, independent creative director; and Miguel Moreno, independent creative director, observed about the advertising aired during Super Bowl 2022 on Circulo’s Big Game Tailgate organized by Circulo Creativo USA.Among the panelists’ favorites were ads for Alexa, Liquid Death, Verizon, Chevrolet, Uber Eats, Rocket Mortgage (house of Barbie), Kia, Pringles, Coinbase and Expedia with Ewan McGregor. Nonetheless, they often disagreed about whether some of the spots were effective or not. But the majority did agree that among the most popular and acclaimed ads, humor was back, a simple kind of humor, “something that when you’re watching a game and you’re a normal spectator, you break into a smile that doesn’t go away,” Moreno said. For D’Amelio, meanwhile, the biggest trend was nostalgia. “For me the nostalgia of humor came back in spots like Los Soprano for Chevrolet or the one for Verizon with Jim Carrey. It seems to me that nostalgia also brings us back to the normality we were used to, it makes you skip certain years and get back to what’s OK.” He said that the Big Game “ended well with commercials that were nostalgic but not sad, including those that were not necessarily humorous. It was all very much like the ‘90s.” “The Super Bowl has always displayed elements of popular culture from the past and the present, but this year it was all very opaque, maybe because of the statistic that showed the average NFL spectator to be 50 years old,” Osorio said.For her part, Leibaschoff asked up to what point a commercial needs a celebrity. “This was of course the Super Bowl and all the advertisers wanted all celebrities in the cast – in other words, there were generally more celebrities than ideas and people who used celebrities just to use them.” However, she admitted that ads like the one for Verizon and that of Los Soprano really do need them, in the sense that “they make the idea take off from the conceptual point of view and not so much because of the celebrity’s popularity.” For Osorio, in past years a certain forced diversity was to be seen. “You noted that there were combinations of people who were put there to complete the checklist of diversity. But now diversity is organic and not forced,” he said. To which D’Amelio added, “Everything is much more organic. I believe we are also improving as a society.”Another of the trends mentioned was that in advertising, many ideas are scripted between one minute to a minute and a half, which makes them “super expensive,” Osorio said. “Seems to me that a lot of them could have been done in 30 seconds, or in a minute instead of a minute and a half. But I am more a fan of ideas that take off and then are quickly given a twist.”For Leibaschoff, this year’s Super Bowl made people forget the pandemic for awhile. “Seeing the Super Bowl and the commercials kept you stuck there and you could forget what was happening with the pandemic.” She said that not one spot reflected the health crisis, “not a word was said about that reality we’re still going through after two years of it. So I think the Big Game made us all feel a little refreshed – it was like taking a deep breath away from the pandemic.” Moreno, however, did not agree. “I don’t believe they did this to make us forget the pandemic for awhile, but rather it was a super strong symptom that there is now no longer any pandemic.” To which Osorio added, ”Everyone tells his story or his joke without any emotional gear attached.” For Osorio another trend was the crypto. “It’s the same that happened years ago when suddenly everyone was a ‘dot.com’ – and now they’re crypto. If you have the silver then spend it,” he said. He considers that ads in the automobile category “are again very sexy,” and that there are again many good commercials in that category.Leibaschoff was intrigued to see that a number of brands that were previously not very widely advertised appeared during the Super Bowl coverage. She was referring to Liquid Death and Planet Fitness, “that are not now so widely advertised, or perhaps don’t feel so important as other brands, yet they count on the Super Bowl and even cast a celebrity.” While for Osorio, this year “the beers came up short,” considering that “they are always the stars” of the show. For the panelists, there was a disconnect between what is popular and what is good or bad. For example, for the general public, Coinbase came in 66th in the ranking, while for advertising media specialists, that spot came in first.