• by Todd Wasserman , February 2, 2022

Image above from last year's State Farm SB ad. So far, the company seems to be missing from this year's game.

We are now less than two weeks from the Super Bowl -- and the makeup of the advertising roster seems to be a return to form. A few advertisers are coming back after a long stretch away, including E*Trade (its first ad since 2014), Lay's (its first ad in 17 years), Gillette (its first ad in 16 years) and Nissan and BMW (their first ads since 2015).

Of course, there are some neophytes, like Hologic, QuickBooks and Meta (nee Facebook), which are running their first Super Bowl ads -- in Meta’s case, the first under its new name.

There is also some talk of a crypto Super Bowl, but so far there are only two crypto advertisers: FTX and Crypto.com. That compares to 14 Super Bowl ads for dot-com companies during the 2000 dot-com Super Bowl, which included long-gone brands like Computer.com, Epidemic.com and Netpliance.

Instead of a Super Bowl marked by an agglomeration of one type of advertiser, there’s a good variety, in what’s seemingly a return to normalcy. That means that there will be car brands advertising (GM, Kia, Nissan, Toyota), snack brands (Doritos, Pringles), beer brands (Budweiser) and oddballs (Vroom, Wallbox, Monday.com).

In other words, since the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020, it looks like a fair number of brands are back in the game, but some questions remain, like:

Expecting a major product release to be announced via a Super Bowl ad? Well, not to disappoint, but such launches are pretty few and far between.  One of the most memorable was from 38 years ago -- Apple’s Macintosh ad  in 1984, with another the ill-fated launch of Crystal Pepsi in 1993.

The closest we come this time around is maybe Wallbox, a Barcelona-based company that makes chargers for electric cars. Wallbox, the first EV supplier to run an ad in the Super Bowl, is breaking a 15-second ad in the second quarter of the game.

Given the ubiquity of insurance advertising, why are there none in the game? Last year, we saw State Farm, Progressive and Geico advertise. Where are they this year?

The largest advertiser of 2021 was Liberty Mutual. Allstate, Progressive and Geico were also in the top 10 for overall advertising spending in 2021.

Yet at this point, it seems as if those former Super Bowl big spenders have all opted to sit out the game this year. Still, there are almost two weeks yet to go.