If commerce is culture, the Super Bowl is where American culture gets bought and sold. 

What we saw between fresh sets of downs this year was a bevy of brands telling tales of two Americas: on one side, ads rooted in sincerity and nostalgia that drive emotional resonance and clarity.

On the other side were advertisements that addressed the vapid nature of consumerism; appealing to our basest desires of vanity, risk-taking, and dark humor to drive engagement and other marketing KPIs.

What we see before us is two Americas, and this stark contrast appears across brand after brand, with their ads revealing a widening divide in each brand’s desired relationship with its consumers.

The Macchiato Bowl: Dunkin’ Vs. Starbucks

Dunkin’ has easily established itself as a fixture for the middle class. Its tagline alone, “American runs on Dunkin’,” sets the tone, but for the past three years, its Super Bowl ad spots have driven the point home.

It has tapped into internet culture fluidly, using Ben Affleck—the ultimate Dunkin’ fanboy—as its star, and aligned itself with the New England Patriots, former home to “DunKing” Tom Brady. The brand has turned its ads into a string of memes, tapping comedy, pop culture, and nostalgia to leave viewers with a feeling of “WTF did I just watch?” 

The feeling undoubtedly returned this year as Dunkin’ had Affleck as the star of “Good Will Dunkin’,” a fictional, never-aired ‘90s sitcom featuring a cast of ‘90s-era TV icons, including Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, Jason Alexander, and Ted Danson, all digitally de-aged for the occasion.

It made strategic sense for Dunkin’ to continue its advertising tradition as the New England Patriots faced off against the Seattle Seahawks. But the Super Bowl unveiled a rival of a second order, with Starbucks sponsoring the pre-game show and debuting a cinematic 90-second ad called “The Coffee Run,” which centered on the brand’s Olympics partnership. 

A simple act of service, delivering coffee to “Team USA” at the Olympics, doesn’t fully translate in the film as the delivery driver’s generosity causes him to run out of coffee before he arrives at the athletes. It’s hardly clear that this is an Olympic partnership until the end, which puts the ad in the danger zone of elitism of a ski chalet town and bougie coffee delivered by a service worker.

Starbucks pulled the narrative through to Monday morning, offering consumers a free tall coffee with a drink purchase to “kick the post-game hangover.” While all the pieces were in place and activated in the right order, the message is fundamentally at odds with their competitor: accessibility vs. relatability. 

The contrast is felt more than it’s seen overtly. Dunkin' sells belonging through a shared cultural memory on a large monocultural stage; Starbucks sells aspiration through global prestige.

These are two fundamentally different relationships to our American identity.

Two Americas.

Legacy Americana in a ‘Horny Brand’ Era: Lay’s Vs. Pringles

The Super Bowl has always been a fixture for “purebred American brands” like Budweiser, Pepsi, and General Motors. Lay’s rejoined this brand rotation in 2022, after nearly sitting out for 17 years. This year, the CPG giant used one of its slots to focus on its Middle American roots.

In the spot, a soon-to-be-retired potato farmer is seen to be officially handing the reins to his daughter, who grew up learning the ropes from her dear old dad. During their lunch breaks, they sat together to eat from their bagged lunches, which included, you guessed it, individual bags of Lay’s potato chips. They are “America’s favorite chip,” after all, an icon that represents America just as much as apple pie.

The sentimentality of a “real” family navigating the inherent changes of the American dream makes the Lay’s ad a favorite among many ad critics. But what makes it even more memorable is that it is a product-led story, showcasing an iconic legacy brand deeply connected to American culture, formed and shaped by real people.

Consider the contrast, then, of the Pringles ad, “Pringleleo,” featuring Sabrina Carpenter creating (and eventually eating) the “perfect man” out of the iconic curved chip.

Carpenter is known for both her sex appeal and her tongue-in-cheek humor, so showing her literally consuming a chip man is a fun play on the “maneater” narrative. But the ad also shows the duality of American culture in 3D, using horny humor as a tool to build a parasocial relationship with consumers.

Lay’s wants you to know that America is hard at work producing. Pringles’, by contrast, sees us as consumers. 

Two Americas.

The Battle of ‘More is More’: DraftKings Vs. Come Near

We opened the year saying that 2026 will be a banner year for predictions markets, and given NBCUniversal’s strategic partnership with DraftKings, we had a bevy of ads to choose from, including an unfunny cameo by Colin Jost and Michael Che that made us wonder if we should place a bet that this is SNL’s last season.

Into this environment stepped Come Near (formerly "He Gets Us"), a cultural phenomenon since its first Super Bowl appearance in 2023. This year's ad pointedly asks: when is more not enough? More pleasure, more money, more beauty, more admiration?

It would be easy to dismiss this as a religious org preaching temperance at the wrong party. But Come Near isn't an outlier; it's a signal of something already moving in the culture. The rise of non-alcoholic beverages, the resurgence of stoicism, and Barna's data on a genuine Christian revival. There is a growing cohort of Americans who are pulling back, choosing deceleration over acceleration.

The accelerationist logic of the post-COVID era has led us to divergent movements. There’s the hedonistic, pleasure-seeking, risk-laden group, which seems to have little hope in a future that is largely out of their control due to a system that they see as corrupt or beyond repair.

DraftKings says the future is more, faster, and always on, but the future is largely uncertain and requires a tolerance for things out of your control. Your only option is to participate or be left behind. You have little choice.

Come Near says the future might be less, slower, and deliberate. There is hope, and it’s bigger than you, but you have agency to do something about it.

Two Americas.

When the Culture War Drives Conversions

If this is a culture war, it’s a proxy war played out through our brands, where our ideologies and worldviews are expressed in contradictory messages of what the American Dream represents, and frankly, what it should represent.

What better venue to wage it than the Super Bowl, where 120 million Americans voluntarily sit down to be marketed to, and where the ads themselves become the discourse?

If commerce is culture, and the Super Bowl is core to American culture, then the game is as much a moment of mass consumption as of collective participation.

This year's ads showed us that there are, indeed, two Americas.