The 15 Worst Super Bowl Commercials Of All Time

Every year, advertisers from across the world descend upon the Super Bowl to unleash their biggest and best spots. The Super Bowl is renowned for featuring some of the best commercials of all time, and it's a trend that continues each year. Having your ad feature during the big game doesn't come cheap, and companies will have to pay a staggering $8 million for a 30-second spot during Super Bowl LIX. 

For every Mean Joe Green Coca-Cola ad, there's a myriad of poor copycats, unoriginal concepts, and annoying catchphrases. As a result, there have been a plethora of poorly made Super Bowl commercials over the years. As well as the cost, it takes a ton of creativity and originality to make a great Super Bowl commercial, but not all of them hit the mark. 

As technology progresses, ads for cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence companies, and more are taking up valuable airtime, and not every commercial is a hit. Here are some of the most controversial and worst Super Bowl commercials ever produced. Some may have endured, but not necessarily for the right reasons.

In 1984, Apple released an ad by legendary movie director Ridley Scott that changed the game in terms of Super Bowl commercials. The highly regarded ad showed a dystopian future to promote its new Macintosh computer in competition with IBM. That ad is now in the Clio Awards Hall of Fame, and it's been spoofed many times in the years since.

Apple tried to one-up itself in 1985 with a new dystopian ad promoting The Macintosh Office, but it completely flopped. In the ad, a large group of executives are marched blindfolded to a cliff, where they jump off like lemmings. Through it all, they sing a somber version of "Heigh-Ho" from "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

It ends with the sole surviving businessman removing his blindfold to find himself alone with The Macintosh Office. The ad's overtones imply that American businesspeople — the ones targeted to buy the product — are stupid. Insulting your targeted demographic is risky in any advertisement, and it blew up in Apple's face with the Tony Scott-directed "Lemmings," which didn't win any awards like its predecessor.

Beer commercials are often less about the product and more about how the beer will ensure you have a good time. Throughout the 1990s, this typically meant a bunch of bikini-clad beautiful women appearing out of nowhere, but Miller Lite didn't always follow the tropes. In 1998, it released the "Evil Beavers" spot during the Super Bowl, and it's one of the most bizarre to date.

In the ad, a group of frontiers people make a home by cutting down some trees to build a log cabin. A man in a beaver costume says "Thieves" in his language and goes on the rampage. He begins to reclaim the wood by chomping at it after riding in on a dirt bike as "Evil Beaver" plays in the background.

The people try to thwart the evil beaver to no avail. He even gnaws through a man's peg leg before enjoying a Miller Lite of his own. The company had been making these types of surreal advertisements since early 1997, directed by Devo member Gerald Casale. They're all weird, but "Evil Beavers" is probably the strangest of them all.

In 2000, tech startups took over the Super Bowl's airtime, spending millions of venture capital funds on advertising spots. One of the most ingenious of these was also the worst, LifeMinders' "The Worst Commercial." The ad begins with the text, "This is the worst commercial of the Super Bowl," and it's not hyperbolic.

Terrible piano music plays throughout the 30-second spot, which is little more than a bland PowerPoint presentation of black text on a yellow background. Shockingly, it cost $2.1 million, and while it's brilliant in its simplicity, it's annoying to listen to and straining on the eyes. It has staying power because of how unusual it is, but it failed to do one thing well: market the product.

Ads need to be clear about the product they're advertising, but the ad keeps LifeMinders' message a little vague. Still, despite how terrible it is, it may have worked, as LifeMinders said it saw 700,000 new signups the week after the ad aired during the Super Bowl. The company sold for $68.1 million the following year, so the unusual ad worked in that capacity.

SalesGenie's 2008 Super Bowl ad is well animated, features adorable panda characters, and is also racist in ways that offended many. The ad is set in Ling Ling's Bamboo Furniture Shack, where Ling Ling the panda worries about their lack of business, and his wife tells him she's not going back to the zoo.

She calls a psychic who advises that Ling Ling use SalesGenie to drum up new customers. They aired a second spot as well, featuring the same characters out with their kids. There's nothing wrong with any of that until you actually hear the characters' voices because many viewers found them to be racial stereotyping of Chinese accents.

Public outcry to the ads led Vinod Gupta, the chairman and chief executive officer of SalesGenie's parent company, to act. He publicly apologized, saying, "We never thought anyone would be offended. The pandas are Chinese. They don't speak German. If I offended anybody, believe me, I apologize" (via The New York Times). True to his word, he pulled both commercials from the air, and they've been a marketing cautionary tale ever since.

Everyone loves receiving flowers, but Teleflora wanted to let everyone know that flowers shipped in a box for Valentine's Day don't cut it. For its 2009 Super Bowl spot, Teleflora shows a woman in an office receiving flowers. When she opens the box, the flowers are wilted and falling apart, but that doesn't stop one of them from chastising her repeatedly.

The flower criticizes the woman, saying, "Oh no, the mug on you, Diane. You're a train wreck. That's why he only sent a box of flowers. Go home to your romance novel and your fat, smelly cat. No one wants to see you naked." It's an interesting way to deprecate the act of sending flowers in a box, but the flowers that arrived are way too nasty, so the message is diluted.

Teleflora followed this up in the 2010 Super Bowl with a new ad that slightly altered the premise. It's in an office, but the woman receiving the nasty (now toned-down) flowers isn't a nice person. This ad was more successful in getting the message across without being mean for no reason.

Advertisements need to be memorable to sell products, but sometimes, a company goes overboard. Sony certainly did in its 2011 Super Bowl spot for its new Ericsson Xperia phone — an ad that has an impressively high production value. The 60-second ad combines elements of body horror and commercial mascots.

It sees a man carrying scissors to a dark backroom, where he hands them to a sweaty surgeon working on the Android OS mascot. He removes bandages from the hands, revealing that he stitched two human thumbs onto them. This gives the mascot the ability to play games, which was a big move for Sony, as the Ericsson Xperia was its first device with PlayStation games support.

Unfortunately, that aspect of the device isn't as clear as the advertisers likely hoped. Instead, removing the creepiness factor that permeates every second of the ad is impossible. It's just too disturbing to see a cute mascot get gruesome human appendages stitched onto it to be useful as a sales pitch of any kind. Sony doubled down with more creepy ads, but the Xperia one is hands down the worst.

HomeAway released an ad promoting its services during Super Bowl XLV, and it didn't go over well with the public. The commercial begins with a man calling himself the Minister of De-Tourism, jumping from a helicopter as he passes a bunch of test rooms. These include all the negative aspects of staying in a hotel, which is meant to highlight the benefits of renting a home through HomeAway.

Suddenly, near the end, a realistic baby doll is thrown against the glass, and it begins to slowly slide down as the man says, "Test baby!" It's entirely inexplicable, and there's a woman in the background looking as horrified as most of the viewers who watched the spot live during the game were.

The ad attempts to make the baby look fake and emblazoned the words "Test Baby" on the screen, but it still failed to work as desired. Some felt it trivialized violence against children, and the ensuing uproar resulted in a statement of apology two days later.

GoDaddy enjoys pushing the envelope in what's considered ordinary or acceptable in ads. Many were a bit risqué for a website hosting platform, and GoDaddy leaned heavily into this in 2013's "Perfect Match" Super Bowl spot. The ad describes the two sides of the company: the sexy side, represented by Bar Refaeli, and the smart side, represented by Walter (Jesse Heiman).

The two lean in and make out for several seconds under the text, "It's a beautiful thing." The mouth noises are particularly disturbing, and it turns out that Heiman kissed a doll to prepare for the iconic 2013 commercial. That disturbing imagery aside, GoDaddy's Super Bowl ad is awkward to watch despite its undeniable legacy.

Heiman typically plays nerds in the background of office shows and movies, and he makes for a good antithesis to a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model like Refaeli. Still, it's not uncommon for people to be disturbed by others' mouth sounds, and the close-up was off-putting as well. Because of this, the ad is more memorable for how awkward it is to watch rather than the services it supposedly hocked.

Getting the point across is one of the most important aspects of a commercial, but it doesn't have to be gut-wrenching — particularly while you're taking a breather from the big game. Nationwide clearly didn't get that memo for its 2015 Super Bowl spot, "Boy." The ad features an unnamed boy lamenting over all the things he will never do. These include riding a bike, getting cooties, flying, and more.

Through all the imagery, the boy smiles and enjoys all the activities he cannot do. He explains this, saying, "I couldn't grow up, because I died from an accident." After this revelation, the imagery switches to an overflowing bathtub and a kitchen cabinet opened with detergent pods spilling out. Nationwide wanted people to know the importance of protecting children, and the ad worked.

It also instills a great deal of sadness in anyone who sees it. The ad was one of many Super Bowl commercials marred by controversy, and it had an impact. Nationwide Chief Marketing Officer Matt Jauchius left the company two months after the ad aired, so the commercial likely didn't have the sort of result he hoped for when he okayed it.

If you've ever heard a jingle — and who hasn't, let's face it — you know how utterly annoying they can be. Almost everyone in the U.S. can tell you the phone number for Kars4Kids, so it's undeniable that jingles work. Mountain Dew went kind of nutty with the jingle for its Super Bowl ad in 2016, and the ad, aptly titled, "Puppy Monkey Baby" is utter nonsense.

Three friends chill on the couch as a puppy-monkey-baby hybrid brings them Mountain Dew's new drink while saying "puppy monkey baby." It dances, and the men get up to join in. The words "puppy monkey baby" are repeated alongside a beat, drumming those words into the viewer like some sort of Mountain Dew-fueled earworm.

While the ad is successful in drilling "puppy monkey baby" into people's minds, it barely shows the product it advertises. You cannot take your eyes off the ridiculous horror that is the eponymous drink-slinging amalgamated monstrosity. In that, "Puppy Monkey Baby" has staying power, but it doesn't work well as an ad trying to sell anything but nightmares.

In its 2018 Super Bowl ad for the Dodge Ram, Dodge decided to honor one of the world's greatest civil rights leaders, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Unfortunately, when trying to sell a truck, the last thing that you should do is reinterpret the words of a great orator like Dr. King because it's not going to go over well with a large chunk of the population.

That's exactly what happened when Dodge unveiled its ad with King's 1968 speech, "The Drum Major Instinct." The 30-second spot is similar to many of Dodge's ads, showcasing American patriotism with uniformed service members amid a slew of Dodge trucks. The ad didn't go over well, leading the King Center to lash out in response.

The ad's imagery is antithetical to King's stated views on military expenditures, commercialization, the Vietnam War, and more. The speech Dodge selected was about "The ill of consumerism and the fact that consumerism was taking over the American consciousness and that we were moving away from humanity," so using it to sell trucks was a slap in the martyred civil rights leader's face (via GBH).

Audi's 2019 Super Bowl ad, "Cashew," begins with gorgeous cinematography as a man arrives at a farm, where he meets his dead grandfather. Undeterred by the ghost, he follows him inside, where Grandpa unveils the e-tron GT, Audi's newest electric car. He sits inside and admires it as he prepares to take off when he's suddenly lifted upward.

He's jolted back to reality as one of his coworkers finishes the Heimlich maneuver, saving his life. He wasn't appreciating Audi's new ride so much as he was slowly dying after choking on a cashew. The 60-second ad is humorous, but it's also a huge fake out that takes the viewer from an idyllic atmosphere before dumping them in a grey-on-grey office.

You can see the loss on his face — he's not happy he's alive because it means everything he experienced was a dream. Audi spent $5 million just to air the ad, which doesn't include production costs. The central message at the end reveals that Audi will be one-third electric by 2025, which is great, but viewers seeing the ad likely feel just as hopeless as the man.

TurboTax went as weird as possible for its 2019 Super Bowl advertisement with "RoboChild." The spot begins with a man introducing his friends to his latest creation, RoboChild. It's a small android with a somewhat realistic baby face accompanied by a child's voice. The man asks what RoboChild wants to be when he grows up, and it says, "I would like to be a TurboTax Live CPA."

They question his desire, telling him that he could be anything. A woman leans down and informs RoboChild that only live people with complex emotions can do the job. RoboChild is sad, so he begins to laugh in an adorable childlike giggle as his inventor reveals that he's still trying to perfect emotions.

It's hard to nail down precisely what TurboTax was doing with this ad. It seems like the company wanted people to know they won't be dealing with robots, but actual people who will help them, but the ad sends this message in a truly bizarre way. The ad has tremendous production value, but it's hard to disassociate the creep factor from the service it advertises.

DC Comics popularized the concept of killing off one of its biggest characters in the 1990s via the "Death of Superman" storyline, which has been copied ad nauseam over the years. Comic book character deaths are impermanent things, and it seems Planters got in on the fun in its 2020 Super Bowl ad. The "Mr. Peanut Funeral" spot is well-produced, but it's also just plain weird.

Wesley Snipes speaks at the funeral as other corporate mascots and actors stand around weeping. The Kool-Aid Man drops a tear onto the grave, and a plant emerges, bearing a baby peanut. Someone asks if he's back, and the animated peanut begins speaking like a dolphin for a few seconds. He then stops and says, "Just kidding, I'm back," before asking for his monocle.

Weird doesn't begin to describe this unusual scene, which supposedly is meant to sell Mr. Peanut's wares alongside some mild nostalgia for the corporate mascot. The ad was pulled in the wake of Kobe Bryant's untimely death, but it later returned to the airwaves to freak out whole new audiences with its anthropomorphic peanut.

People love Super Bowl commercials, but they don't like to have their game interrupted beyond them. Tubi merged both concepts of an outstanding Super Bowl commercial with literally changing the channel, and it did not go over well. The 2023 15-second ad begins with Fox Sports commentary about the game, but the action is interrupted.

The screen shows what appears to be someone using their remote to open the Tubi app, followed by the logo, closing out the spot. This caused real fights in living rooms across the United States, as people freaked out that someone watching the game with them got a hold of the remote. One couple broke up when a woman's boyfriend violently screamed at her.

Videos all over the Internet show people freaking out, believing that the channel was changed mid-game. Overreactions aside, the ad didn't engender viewers' adoration of Tubi. Instead, it infuriated a group of people already on edge, watching their favorite game of the year. This alone made Tubi's ad one of the worst to air during Super Bowl LVII.