TR.BIZ: 1.20.2026
From very early Super Bowl commercials to vagueposting, this is your early-mid-week check-in ✨
Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re talking early Super Bowl commercials, vagueposting, returning to khia asylum, and growing hate for teens on e-bikes.
🎪 Eventful: Getting chatty in NYC
A very quick something: but: if you’re in NYC today and or next Tuesday, come join Ben Dietz and I for two live conversations as a part of our 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 podcast! Both will be hosted by Air in Chinatown, the first being tonight with Nikita Walia — RSVP here! — and next Tuesday’s being with Willa Bennett, editor-in-chief at Cosmopolitan and Seventeen: RSVP here! It should be a lot of fun and I’d love to see you all there. Also? I’m doing a lil happy hour meet up Thursday in Bed Stuy at Bearded Lady: RSVP here for it!
🩹 Branded: Previews for commercials
Is the Super Bowl still the cultural juggernaut it once was? I’d say so, but largely because it still holds a special place in the hearts of football people and general dude culture: that is a fact, emphasized by the numbers being up and down and up for most of this century. But for the non-footbally inclined and more easily influenced? I’m not sure they’re really watching or caring about the games, meaning commercials aren’t hitting as hard and potentially losing their meaning. This is a theory I have as this is what feels like the second or third year where the Super Bowl is preceded by “previews” for commercials airing that night. A sneak of a Pringles commercial with Sabrina Carpenter, a taste of a Skittles commercial with Elijah Wood, an early look at Budweiser’s new horse commercial, a preview of Squarespace’s return, a first peek at Kinder Bueno’s big game debut: what’s happening? There are many logical theories to this — that this is a troubling low for capitalism, that this is what happens when people are trained to confuse commercials for culture, that we’re deep in an illiteracy crisis — but I think the more fitting answer is something closer to the Marty Supreme of it all: in a cultural recession, ads and advertising are confused for culture because people have been trained to no longer understand art, to not care how things are made, and to make life so easy that you lose your intellectual stamina. Death by all of the above, really, which is how we end up with the problem of ads being everywhere but no one fully knowing what’s being advertised. Life in the slop trenches to the point that even Super Bowl commercials suffer!
👀 Trend Watchers, I: Move over rage bait: meet vagueposting
