Monday morning after the Super Bowl is always an interesting time to be at an ad agency. And when I say “interesting,” I mostly mean “insufferable.”

In every corner of this painfully open office plan, you can hear people discussing ads from the night before. Amongst the lukewarm debates over #BabyNut, indifference towards chaotic, crowd-sourced storylines, and forced nostalgia for Bill Murray, I heard one co-worker admit: “I didn’t watch this year.”

I swear I heard an audible gasp. An ominous silence settled over the floor. For ad nerds, skipping the Super Bowl is like me skipping a meal. It just does not happen.

Despite the universal horror at this co-worker’s confession, I had to admit that I understood his apathy. Yes, I did watch the Super Bowl. But no, I didn’t really care about it.

In years past, I’ve been almost fanatical about my attention to Super Bowl ads. I was “that person” at the party who shushed the crowd to hear the dialogue. I took notes on my phone. I wrote 2,000+ word recaps in painful detail.

So what changed?

I’d like to blame it on the cynicism that seems to settle over each and every advertising professional at some point in his/her life. But I would hope that it’s too early in my career for that to be true.

For some reason, Super Bowl advertising this year felt especially…pointless. In this age of micro-targeted, über-personalized, geo-located advertising, these ads to the masses felt pitifully generic.

As consumers have gotten used to advertising and increasingly hostile towards it, they expect more. The typical formula of high production value and celebrity cameos just isn’t enough anymore. When everything is a remake or a crossover, the spirit of truly original ideas feels lost.

Super Bowl ads aren’t working because they’re trying too hard to be Super Bowl ads. They are all workshopped and tested and tweaked to death because they are put on a high (and highly expensive) pedestal.

When there’s that much money on the line, very few brands are willing to take risks. At the end of the day, that lack of risk-taking is what leads to safe, expected ads that this ad nerd just doesn’t really care about.