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At ADWEEK, it’s sometimes hard to remember that there’s an entire sports contest going on during advertising’s biggest night of the year.
But from our vantage point, the football team from Kansas City wasn’t the only group of losers—there were ads that flopped, celebs that just weren’t funny, and longstanding trends that dropped off this year.
And while there were serious diversity failures in this year’s crop of ads, this year’s game was also nearly void of another set of Big Game stars: Dogs, cats, and electric vehicles, according to an AI-powered analysis from Hive.
Canine catastrophe?
In years past, dogs have truly shined at the Super Bowl.
They play supporting roles alongside Budweiser’s Clydesdales, they serve as one third of that disturbing Mountain Dew mascot, they turn into robots, they don wiener costumes and stampede across fields, and, at their best, they live long, happy lives that bring tears to the eyes of even the macho-est of football fans.
This year, though, the pup cameos were few and far between. While dogs were featured in 18 of last year’s Big Game ads, and cats featured in three, pet representation plummeted in 2025. Dogs appeared in only three ads, and cats didn’t make the cut at all.
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