Ad nauseam: The 25 worst Super Bowl commercials

The premise is that “Larry David” has, throughout the years, been skeptical about things that have proven quite successful. So, naturally, when Larry David is skeptical about crypto, we should take that as a sign. That’s the premise of this ad from FTX. Now, to Google FTX and see what they’ve been up to…

Super Bowl ads are often “random,” or to put it another way “weird for the sake of weird.” Mountain Dew’s “Puppymonkeybaby” is sort of the meta version of randomness, but frankly that isn’t any better. It’s just annoying and bad.

Should we blame Budweiser for millions of people driving “Wassup?” into the ground? Maybe not. Should we blame Budweiser for doing “Wassup?” way too many times? Absolutely. Was “Wassup?” ever actually funny? Well, no.

The greatest offenders on the “random” humor front is Old Spice. It all began with the Super Bowl. This is the first ad with the “Old Spice Guy,” played by Isaiah Mustafa, and right from the get go these ads were grating and not funny in any capacity.

There is a young boy. He’s talking to us about the stuff that kids do. This kid will never do any of those things, though, because, as he tells us, he’s dead. He died in an accident at home. Which is why…you need Nationwide? A staggering misfire with a brutal twist that feels unfathomable.

GoDaddy’s trashy, Carl Jr.’s-esque branding was also awful. It’s funny to see ads from them these days remember what garbage they used to put out. One particularly atrocious ad from GoDaddy featured the model Bar Refaeli and some random “nerdy” guy making out. That’s all it was, right down to the mouth sounds that were captured in almost impressive audio quality.

And yet, that wasn’t the worst GoDaddy ad ! You may recall the days of Danica Patrick being part of the “sexy” ad era for the company. In a truly gross iteration, two teenage bro types have somehow gained the ability to control Patrick and are having her shower for their pleasure. The thought process for a commercial like this is almost unfathomable.

SalesGenie wasn’t a company a lot of people had heard of when they dropped an ad featuring some cartoon pandas. It just so happened those pandas spoke with offensive, stereotypical Asian accents. The ads got major backlash and SalesGenie went away as quickly as it rose.

The idea of doing an “intentionally bad” Super Bowl ad is, frankly, lazy and inane as is. However, Lifeminders’ self-professed bad ad was also even bad at being an intentionally bad ad. It’s impressive for a commercial to be so unsuccessful in multiple ways.

You have probably seen the green Android mascot. Now, imagine if that robotic character had a human thumb sewed to their hand. Sony thought this would be a good idea. It was not.

There are distance runners who don’t wear shoes, some of them even marathoners. Just for Feet thought that was a market that needed to be taken by force evidently. In this ad, a Kenyan distance runner is seemingly fleeing from some nefarious forces. The runner faints, and when he awakens, he has shoes on his feet. Sure, not the worst thing in the world, but a weird energy for a commercial.

A guy in a beaver suit doing evil stuff, most of it involving eating wood, doesn’t necessarily have to be bad. It could be a sweaty, middling Super Bowl commercial. The execution of Miller Lite’s evil beaver ad really rubbed people the wrong way, though, leading it to be considered one of the worst Super Bowl ads by many.

In 1984, Apple released one of the iconic Super Bowl commercials, perhaps the definitive Super Bowl commercial, in fact. Why wouldn’t they go for another big swing in 1985? This time, in the ad “Lemmings,” a bunch of blindfolded people in suits whistling and walking off a cliff. The message? Don’t blindly follow the pack, buy a Macintosh computer! However, in the wake of the “1984” ad, “Lemmings” felt heavy-handed and self-satisfied. Apple was a little too pleased with itself, and it showed.

Squarespace got Dolly Parton to sing a riff on her song “9 to 5” called “5 to 9,” the premise being that people could use Squarespace to make a website for their side hustles. The issue here, though, is the almost glib way this ad deals with the unfair labor practices and economic disparity that leads to so many people needing a “side hustle” just to make ends meet. Squarespace’s commercial is almost encouraging of people working away all their waking hours as if though that isn’t an issue.

This is a recent Super Bowl ad that really seemed to not sit well with people. Doja Cat stars in an over-the-top Taco Bell ad that really didn’t deliver anything. Also, it has clowns in it, and that’s always going to rub some people the wrong way.

One of the inane staples of Super Bowl ads is the overarching premise, “The people who use our products suck.” That’s the theme of canned cocktail company Cutwater Spirits ad “Here’s to the lazy ones.” The crux of the ad is basically, “Hey, you lazy sack of trash, buy our drinks because you are too shiftless to even make a vodka soda for yourself.”

Sometimes, companies really oversell how much people care about them. Planters’ big swing related to Mr. Peanut is a clear example of that. They “killed” Mr. Peanut to get social media buzz, and then had an advertisement featuring his funeral, and also the birth of a Baby Peanut to get some of that Baby Yoda love. And yet, most people only reacted with “Who cares?”

Martin Luther King Jr. was many things, but a truck salesman he was not. His rhetoric was used to fight for equality and civil rights, but Dodge decided to use a speech from the late icon to sell their Ram trucks, which was, at best, tacky.

What if a car took Viagra? It would just get bigger, right? That’s the “joke” of the ad for the Fiat 500X. A Viagra pill gets in the gas tank of a compact car, which then grows into the Fiat 500X. You know, like a human erection.

Bruce Springsteen has spoken about political issues in the past, and he has a certain amount of cache. Jeep hired The Boss for an ad which is an incredible simulation of a coherent speech about community. Springsteen mostly just rambles and doesn’t seem to say anything of substance, perhaps because Jeep was worried about rubbing potential car buyers the wrong way. Why not bore everybody instead of annoying some people?

The 1970 ad for the Gillette Techmatic Razor has been cited as the first notable “bad” Super Bowl ad. Hey, that was still fairly early in the life of the Super Bowl, before it was the cultural event it would become. The Techmatic had a dial you could turn up or down depending on how heavy your beard was (Ah, 1970s technology). The razor can talk, and it has a high, squeaky voice at first, but it gets deeper and deeper as the dial turns up. Now, by modern standards, it may just feel more cheesy than bad, but it is an important piece of culture in a way.

Some visuals just shouldn’t be seen, especially with the budget of a commercial as opposed to a big-budget film. Rocket Mortgage had a decent concept involving Jason Momoa’s appearance being less accurate than meets the eye. However, in execution, the ad was nightmare fuel straight from the Uncanny Valley.

At a time when protests were breaking out across the United States, Pepsi got an idea in their head that probably should have been reconsidered. For the Super Bowl, the cola company got celebrity personality Kendall Jenner for an ad that struck just about everybody as tone deaf.

Anheuser-Busch is a massive beer company behind an assortment of brands, and they have never been shy about Super Bowl ads, when they rolled out the new beer Beck’s Sapphire in 2013, though, they got caught up in the “random” humor of the era. The ad was just a fish swimming around in a bottle of beer, singing the song “No Diggity.”

In was bad enough in 2023 when a creepier version of the famed E*Trade Baby debuted. This time, he brought along friends. In 2024, that bad idea was doubled down on, and this time we lost the slim bit of patience we had left. Plus, they make a bunch of cheesy, warmed-over pickleball jokes.

Do you remember OK Soda? It was a soda pitched toward Generation X by Coca-Cola in 1993. The advertising was ironic and intentionally sparse and poor. It didn't work, and OK Soda was discontinued in 1995. Poppi is Gen Z's answer to OK Soda. The ad is all banal sincerity and empty, vague statements about it being the future of "soda" and being "healthy." It will be gone in two years. Also, the marketing is worse than OK Soda's. Score one for Gen X over Gen Z.

Personally, we don’t necessarily hate this ad from GM, but it is often cited as one of the worst, if not the worst, Super Bowl ad ever, one that GM has tried to bury entirely due to the backlash. It is, admittedly, a dark ad. A robot from the GM production line is fired and quickly becomes so despondent that this robot jumps off a bridge to commit suıcide. This really struck many people wrong in a major way, and as such, we figured it was a must to include.