Football fans remember Super Bowl XXXIV as the only Super Bowl victory for Kurt Warner and his Greatest Show on Turf-era St. Louis Rams. One of the most exciting teams of the late 90s and early 2000s, the Rams would win only one Super Bowl before crumbling. Sad.
The rest of the world remembers that night as the “Dot-com Super Bowl,” with the game’s highly anticipated commercials being absolutely dominated by dot-com companies that year.
If you weren’t there at the time, it’s easy to think that people in 2000 were just being overdramatic. After all, it couldn’t have been that many dot-com commercials… right? Well, 14 dot-com companies bought a $2 million ad spot for the broadcast. That’s around 20 percent of the ads for the night, which means you probably saw at least one dot-com ad during every commercial break. That’s a pretty wild ratio.
AI Takes Over the Big Game: Will Super Bowl LX Be the Next Dot-Com Bowl Disaster?
So, which websites had Super Bowl ads in 2000? Well, perhaps the biggest star of the night was Pets.com, whose sock-puppet mascot went “viral” before memes and going viral were a regular thing. There was also an ad for Webvan (a precursor to DoorDash) and eToys, both of which went bankrupt the following year.
Perhaps the biggest issue was the fact that the ads themselves were kind of… not the best? They were loud and abstract, which is in my wheelhouse, but they didn’t resonate with a mainstream Super Bowl audience that didn’t quite get the internet in January of 2000.
Soon after, the dot-com bubble would burst. And many of the companies advertised during Super Bowl XXXIV would be gone before The Big Game in 2001. Now, as we fast-forward to tonight’s game, Super Bowl LX, it’s hard not to think that we’re heading towards the “AI Bowl,” the spiritual successor to that night in 2000.
Like the internet, AI is transforming technology rapidly. Perhaps too rapidly. It’s also filled with buzzwords we’re all already tired of hearing about. The only thing missing at this point is the overmarketing in front of a massive audience, which… that’s probably about to happen.
To be fair, there’s a good chance that a few of tonight’s AI ads are actually going to be fun and memorable. But it’s also likely to lead to a lot of audience confusion, which will, once again, create the same exact vibes the “Dot-com Bowl” did almost 3 decades ago. So, don’t be surprised if you and your friends and family go, “wait, what does this actually do?” more than once this evening.
Now, will VH1 be making fun of the “AI Bowl” in 15 years on an I Love the 20s special series? Probably not, because sadly, they don’t really make those things anymore. But will the internet, and society as a whole, remember tonight’s Super Bowl ads in infamy one day? It wouldn’t surprise me.
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