Hellmann’s big Super Bowl ad this year stars Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reunited at New York City’s iconic Katz’s Deli to re-enact their famous scene from the 1989 Nora Ephron romantic comedy “When Harry Met Sally.” In case you somehow don’t know what I’m referring to, the scene involves Meg Ryan loudly faking an orgasm while eating a sandwich.
“I’ll have what she’s having,” the older woman at the next table tells the waiter.
The 30-second Hellmann’s ad, created by the agency VML New York, features both actors reprising their roles from 36 years ago. Billy Crystal once again dons his famous aran sweater.
“I can’t believe they let us back in this place,” he says.
Meg Ryan squeezes some Hellmann’s mayonnaise on her sandwich, then proceeds to moan and yell all over again. Sydney Sweeney, seated at a table nearby, delivers the punchline: “I’ll have what she’s having.”
Nostalgia marketing — in the form of pandering advertisements, as well as in fashion trends, original media, and “retro” products — works in approximately 20 to 30 year cycles.
Nostalgic Super Bowl ads are nothing new. As far back as 1979, Miller ran a commercial called “Famous Ex-Quarterbacks,” featuring three NFL players whose careers had peaked a decade or two before. In 1989, a Sears ad featured the 1970 song “Our House” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. A 1992 spot for Hyundai is scored to the 1961 Ben E. King hit “Stand By Me.” In 1999, a commercial for Progressive Insurance featured ET, a nod to the 1982 blockbuster. The next year, in 2000, Oldsmobile had a Super Bowl spot that showed a group of young, hip people singing the 1979 new wave song “Cars” by Gary Numan. At the height of the recession in 2009, cashforgold.com cast MC Hammer — famous for his 1990 single “U Can’t Touch This” and his subsequent bankruptcy — in an ad that poked fun at said bankruptcy. A 2013 Beck’s Sapphire Beer ad featured a goldfish singing the 1996 R&B hit “No Diggity” by Blackstreet. By 2019, Sarah Jessica Parker was reprising her role as the Y2K-era Carrie Bradshaw for a Stella Artois commercial. That same year, the Backstreet Boys starred alongside Chance the Rapper to promote Doritos, performing their 1999 song “I Want it That Way.”
If you look closely at this timeline — the ads and their nostalgic inspirations — a pattern starts to emerge. The featured song, film or celebrity is a touchstone from roughly 20 to 30 years in the past. And as we move through time, the nostalgic touchstones get more recent.
There is a reason for this. Nostalgia marketing — in the form of pandering advertisements, as well as in fashion trends, original media and “retro” products — works in approximately 20- to 30-year cycles. This is how long it takes for kids who experienced culture the first time around to grow up and start making culture of their own. Also, it’s how long it takes for those kids to become adults with disposable income and a yearning for the good old days of their childhood and adolescence.
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, and it can provide real gains for the companies that tap into it. One 2014 study found that nostalgia makes consumers more willing to spend their money. In a famous scene from the hit Netflix series “Mad Men,” the advertising executive Don Draper explains in a pitch meeting that “nostalgia means the pain from an old wound … a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” Nostalgia can even distort our views of the past; one YouGov survey found that people are most likely to say that the best time in America was whatever year they happened to be 11 years old.
Humans have always reminisced about how great things were when they were young. But mass media and mass consumer capitalism are much newer phenomena in human history.
Humans have always reminisced about how great things were when they were young. But mass media and mass consumer capitalism are much newer phenomena in human history. It wasn’t until the ’70s when that 20- to 30-year nostalgia cycle really formed. In that decade — which came on the heels of multiple high-level political assassinations, massive social upheaval, an unpopular war and a near-miss of nuclear annihilation — there was a profusion of nostalgia for the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1973, George Lucas’ film “American Graffiti” came out, featuring the doo-wop and roadsters of a pre-countercultural California. The next year, the 1950s-themed sitcom “Happy Days” aired on ABC. It ran until 1984, becoming one of the most successful sitcoms of all time. In the 1980s, 1950s diners began to open, with jukeboxes, chrome seats, shimmery formica countertops, waitstaff in poodle skirts, and Googie-inspired neon lighting.
I was born in 1988. When I was a teen in the Y2K era, the nostalgia cycle was stuck in the 1960s and ’70s, marketing to baby boomers who were all now firmly in middle age, as well as their bell-bottom-curious millennial kids. This latter marketing concept, it’s worth noting, is called nowstalgia: the marketing of the past to people who didn’t experience it the first time. Flared jeans and peasant tops were in fashion, and every week I’d tune into “That ’70s Show,” more or less a modern update of “Happy Days.”
I remember watching the Super Bowl with my dad in 2002. That year, Led Zeppelin — who had refused to license their music to advertisers for decades — brokered a deal with Cadillac. The American luxury automaker used the band’s 1971 song “Rock and Roll” in a campaign titled “Break Through,” produced by the agency D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles. The ad debuted at the Super Bowl that year, and my dad, who was born in 1954, was flabbergasted.
“Boomers must be getting old,” he said to me.
Currently, we’re in the cultural grip of Y2K nostalgia. Ad campaigns featuring fads and celebrities from the late ’90s through the mid-2000s are everywhere. Ludacris is the face of State Farm, and the Backstreet Boys, in addition to selling Doritos, star in a Downey ad. Kids are wearing cargo pants and baby tees. I imagine that Super Bowl ads will continue to mine from my pop cultural memories for a while, and that they will continue to use touchstones from the ’90s, ’80s and ’70s as long as there are significant cohorts that remember each of these decades.
Eventually, though, the window will shift. It seems like there has been a decrease in ’50s nostalgia in contemporary popular culture, for the simple reason that the ’50s is moving further and further into the past, and there are fewer people around with fond memories of it than in, say, the ’70s and ’80s. And the nostalgia window will almost certainly move beyond Y2K nostalgia, to the trends and stars important to Gen Z and, eventually, Gen Alpha.
But what will that look like? There has been some speculation that the internet has brought about the death of monoculture (widely shared pop cultural touchstones), and has arrested the introduction of new trends in favor of constantly remixed “cores” and “aesthetics” that mine the past for their inspiration. As the theorist Mark Fisher observed as early as 2009, pop culture seems to be stuck in the past, unable to move forward with truly unique trends and products. What would Super Bowl ads nostalgic for the 2010s or the 2020s look like? Would there even be a unique popular culture to reference?
Maybe the nostalgia marketing cycle does end in the Y2K era. But maybe that’s just a cope by a woman on the cusp of middle age. Twenty years from now (assuming the Super Bowl still exists), I’ll probably be watching aging influencers bringing back their broccoli hairstyles and talking about how some new erectile dysfunction drug will give you skibidi rizz. My adult niece and nephew will complain that this means they’re getting old. I will have no idea what is going on, because I’ll be outside that marketing demographic.
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