PODCASTS:
Feb. 9, 2026 ~ Chris Renwick, Lloyd Jackson, and Jamie Edmonds discuss Super Bowl ads with Professor of Practice Emeritus at MSU’s Department of Advertising and Public Relations Robert Kolt, covering hits, misses, and AI’s impact.
Feb. 9, 2026 ~ Assistant Professor of Teaching at Wayne State University Catherine Cuckovich breaks down this year’s Super Bowl commercials.
With the 2026 Super Bowl came another set of commercials produced for the most-watched TV broadcast of the year, with AI being a major throughline with many of the ads.
Tech companies like Anthropic and OpenAI promoted their large-language models and chatbots, with Google showcasing its Nano Banana Pro image generation service. One notable ad came from vodka brand Svedka, whose commercial was almost entirely AI-generated.
“I actually think that AI and a lot of animation helped the ads because sometimes it’s really hard to get across your message in a short period of time,” said Robert Kolt, professor of Practice Emeritus at MSU’s Department of Advertising and Public Relations. “We’ll accept it if it works. It’s when it doesn’t work that you don’t want to see it.“
