This year’s Super Bowl was a mostly boring game of football with a great Kendrick Lamar concert in the middle. Of course, sprinkled liberally through out all of Super Bowl 59 were expensive commercials. And like in years past, nearly every ad included actors, musicians and other famous people selling out for a paycheck. Remember when used to bully celebs for hawking cars and beer? We should go back to doing that.
Sure, if you dig through history you can find numerous examples of famous actors and artists appearing in ads, even during the height of their career. It definitely happened. However, it was still a fairly rare occurrence and most big-name actors were careful about appearing in too many. For example, Tommy Lee Jones and other Hollywood stars would fly over to Japan and other countries to do commercials so nobody over here in the States would see them. There was still a fear that if you sold out too much and too often you’d look desperate and signal that your career was ending. And this was the case for decades.
Then Super Bowl commercials became bigger and bigger in the 2000s and companies spent more and more to create a viral, popular ad. And as this was happening, the lines between TV, movies, and internet content started to blur, while streaming services and YouTube grew in popularity. Hustle culture—the belief that as long as you were getting paid it was worth it—also grew during this time. I remember people in 2015 cheering Kim Kardashian for appearing in a big Super Bowl ad and celebrating that she “got paid!”
That has led us to 2025 and nearly every damn Super Bowl ad including famous people to help sell soda or crackers. And it’s all so sad. Watching Harrison Ford, an actor whom I really like and who has turned in some incredible performances, try to connect being a hero to owning a Jeep made me want to throw my TV out the window. Being assaulted with 20 different variations on “Actors and celebs behaving wacky while holding branded products” made me want to throw my phone out the window.
I think what really drives me nuts about these ads is how transparently greedy it all is. A lot of the people appearing in these commercials don’t need the money and yet, they likely got paid quite a bit to appear. And they just don’t care anymore about even pretending to look like artists or creators with backbones and morals.
They know that most people don’t care anymore. Everything we watch appears on the same tiny phone screen. The delineation between movies and TV and random viral videos is gone. It’s been gone for awhile. And that means there isn’t anything stopping someone like Barry Keoghan appearing in an ad for Square Space. It won’t ruin his career or cost him fans or make him less of an artist anymore. Actors can freely dig up past roles and characters, skin them, and prance about for 30 seconds recreating some moment you might remember, and get paid a lot to do it while suffering no negative consequences.
You might wonder “Who does this hurt?” or “What’s the harm of celebs getting paid to do commercials?” And to be clear, none of this is really hurting anybody. There are certainly bigger problems in the world right now. But that doesn’t change that it sucks shit—it hurts art. Hawking products for cash makes you a salesperson, not an artist.
So my suggestion is simple: Let’s start making fun of celebs for selling out and reminding them that its gross. It’s going to take a few years to build up momentum and change anything, but if we pull this off and we go back to making actors and artists feel shame again, we all might be able to avoid shit like Seal appearing as a seal in a fucking soda ad.
Doesn’t that sounds like a future you want to live in?
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