They are art. I mean, art is just something that is produced by human creativity. But whether or not they are high art is sorta hard to determine. You aren't going to see ad-agency produced stuff in museums anytime soon, but do we consider something like Warhol's soup cans to be a commercial? If we do, then that is an example of a commercial becoming high art. But if that pop art type of thing isn't considered a commercial, then I think we'd be hard pressed to find commercials as high art.
But that's now. Maybe in 100 years our commercials will be exhibited in art exhibits in the same was that old penny-dreadfuls are sometimes considered literary now.
I'll be waiting for the 2050's to see if the commercials of the 1950's are looked at as art.
Though in that sense it's not likely. Advertisement in the 50's was much more concerned with pushing as much information as possible, print or TV. There wasn't much design in ads then, they all pretty much adapted the hard-core salesmen spirit by laying out why you should but such-and-such a product in a way that's making an argument. More and more now advertisement is geared much more to relaying a spirit of the product.
So in this sense we may be waiting until 2070 if we're taking the hundred-years estimate as truth to when we can detach ourselves from something enough to look back at it as if it was art.
Though having said this we come to Andy Warhol and the purpose of his art. One artistic examination I heard for his work is that it stems from the dadaist methodology born from taking a urinal and tipping it over and presenting it as art. Warhol's work adapted what was every-day to frame it as something higher than it was (in the case of the urinal, it was to mock the art community by enshrining a manufactured commodity as high-art). Marilyn Monroe had the Triptych made of her by Warhol to underscore her goddess-tier worship by her fans at the time, and Campbell's Soup in much the same way.
Now to apply this to advertisement I don't think we'll hold a Chrysler ad as high-art or anything. You could for one make the claim an ad for a car - or any other product - isn't aiming for any sort of immortality (though you could argue that's the same for Warhol's work), but is seeking for the moment in time to sell the product immediately then and there, it's not reaching for a broad and timeless sort of spirit that would keep something relevant for such a long time it becomes a permanent artistic fixture. Advertisement is geared so much for in the moment they flash on and sputter out quickly so I can't really see them considered as "art" in the sense as the great masters.
If we were to make an TV commercial that was made to be high-art then I would say it wouldn't need to be for a single product. It would need to be for the concept of the product. In a way a commercial for consumerism as a whole, a meta thirty-second examination of consumerist culture that is like Warhol's work. But a Surge or Zoobooks commercial from the nineties isn't going to be that and all it's going to do is invoke nostalgia as all these ads we have now will invoke nostalgia later.
That said, I do think commercials will be immortalized, but not for their art value. More like for their anthropological value in history of the 20th and 21st century.
IF you're worried about our time being looked at through the lens of television ads only, then I would sure as hell start printing out all your online conversations now so we don't lose them to data corruption or incompatibility; or they just get straight-up deleted.
EDIT - on the other hand, we are living in a unique time compared to the past. We are a time of mass media and information. We can literally pump out more images than people of the 19th century and the 17th before them. So inevitably something might be looked as high-art, if only for its aesthetic or what society happens to be doing at that time (will we go full Fallout in fifty years?).
