Give them credit for continued effort even after the game is essentially over. And I'm not talking about the Kansas City Chiefs, whose offense finally managed to show up with about eight minutes left in the game. We knew things might go south for the Chiefs when it turned out that Donald Trump was more popular than Taylor Swift:

America is waking up. The entire stadium booed leftist activist Taylor Swift but erupted in deafening cheers for President Trump. That’s not just a reaction—it’s a statement. The American people are done with the media’s manufactured narratives, done with the celebrity elites… pic.twitter.com/aAj43aFXhF

— Torsten Prochnow (@TorstenProchnow) February 10, 2025

Imagine that! At the party I attended, we began to notice that the broadcast didn't show many shots of Swift. The consensus was (a) who cares, followed by (b) Fox had clearly understood that people wanted to watch the game rather than read People Magazine. Although last night, People Magazine might have been more entertaining.

Did the boos reflect the NFL's bizarre preoccupation with TayTay, or as Torsten suggests, a sign that "the political and cultural tide is turning fast"? For that, we can look at a couple of the notable ads for what they said, and the rest for what they didn't. 

First off, let's start with the losers, and again I don't mean the Chiefs. Bud Light made itself into a verb by not just embracing the uber-woke cultural tide with its use of cross-dressing Dylan Mulvaney but with its insulting accusations against consumers for actually enjoying previous Bud Light promotional campaigns. Then-exec Alissa Heinerscheid lectured Bud Light customers for responding to "fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor" rather than being Enlightened Modern Men Who Reject Testosterone And Cry At Rom-Coms. Bud Light then lost 40% of its sales over the next two years, which raised questions about who the remaining 60% are.

How could Bud Light come back from this debacle? By, er ... overcompensating:

This made no impression among my friends at the party, as most of us were having too much fun socializing to pay much attention. If we had seen it, it would have produced gales of laughter, and not in the way Bud Light intended. Rather than return to the usual focus on friends and parties, Bud Light instead chose to parody men by making their masculinity ridiculous. 

The nadir of this overcompensation was the sequence with the leaf-blowers used as phallic symbols while [careful, Ed, CAREFUL!] uhhh ... ejecting Bud Light out of excitement. The positioning of the tubes is anything but coincidental and would have made Freud himself blush. (In fact, check his grave; he might still have blushed.) That sequence starts 18 seconds into the ad, which seems just a tad premature, no? The whole thing looks like something Heinerscheid would have cooked up as her idea of toxic masculinity.

Carls Jr/Hardees had a better grasp of the moment. A few years back, they used to produce commercials using sex and cars that provoked the ire of the Heinserscheids, until their management decided to soften their approach. This year, they brought back the Hangover Burger to get over their woke hangover, and it works much better than Bud Light's ad:

Part of the reason this works is because Carls Jr has a much smaller hill to overcome. This is still rather tame compared to some of the earlier ads, but the sense of fun is back, along with the DGAF sense that made the earlier Carls Jr/Hardees ads so attractive.

Even PSAs got into the act. One commercial for breast-cancer awareness spent at least half of the ad grabbing everyone's attention through lingerie, swimwear, and low-cut blouses before getting to the point of the message, which Wanda Sykes delivered. (I couldn't find that ad on YouTube, but perhaps it might be part of a collection posted there or elsewhere.) It was sassy and fun before turning serious, and celebrated rather than scolded.

It's possible I missed a few ads, but nothing I saw suggested that woke was operative in messaging or context. If the Super Bowl previews the ad campaigns to come (and they usually do), the ad industry appears to have dumped the entire concept this year. Even the NFL dialed it down this year, removing the "End Racism" slogans in the end zones and replacing them with "Choose Love" instead. The ads and the programming both turned out to be blessedly woke-free for the first time in years.

How dead is woke? All of the women in Nike's ad turned out to be actual women:

Democrats may not be listening to the electorate, but Madison Avenue certainly has. The message is clear: political correctness and The Shrieking of the Progressive Karens are dead. Long live the Hangover Burger and every other industrial lager than Bud Light. Maybe we can even start a new MATA movement -- Make Taylor Great Again!