Two years ago I surveyed an esteemed panel of industry insiders to find the best Super Bowl ads of all time. The overwhelming favorite was Apple’s “1984,” a celebrated spot that aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII.
The minute-long ad, conceived by advertising agency Chiat/Day and directed by Ridley Scott, heralded the introduction of the Macintosh personal computer and ran on television only once—“yet it generated more buzz than any other commercial ever made,” said William Gelner, executive creative director at 180 LA.
Bob Horowitz, president of Juma Entertainment and executive producer of the annual CBS show “Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials,” says Super Bowl ads are successful if they accomplish one of two things. “They must entertain with clever, over-the-top--but not too silly--creative that has viewers wanting to re-tell punch lines at the water cooler the next morning. Or the commercial has to tug at the heart strings, providing an emotional connection for viewers and the corporate message,” he says “Viewers watch the game to be entertained by those 30 and 60-second commercials. If the spots don't meet those entertaining expectations, $4 million is wasted.”
Ryan Aynes, co-founder and managing director of EDGE Collective, says great ads are able to hook viewers within the first few seconds and leave them with something to think about. “Successful ads are often funny without giving into to gimmicks—and above all else, Super Bowl ads are about being creative and entertaining the audience.” A good Super Bowl Ad does not need to have an expensive production budget, but if it can connect with people on an emotional level with such things as laughter or tears, then it has done its job, he says.
“We believe that all great creative is culturally relevant and has no dead ends,” adds Sharon Napier, the chief executive of Partners + Napier. “In the context of the Super Bowl, this means that the ad creates some sort of action when the game is over – whether it’s a joining an online community, tweeting about it, or sharing it with others. Of course, at the end of the day, it has to be entertaining, but let’s not forget that the creative is in service to a brand – and it has to connect the two.”
A handful of ads, like Apple’s “1984,” Coca-Cola’s “Mean Joe Greene” and Budweiser’s “Frogs,” managed to grab our attention during the big game and kept us talking about them for decades later—but we’ve also seen some major flops throughout the years.
Bill Winchester, chief creative officer and EVP at Lindsay, Stone & Briggs, says it’s easy to make bad advertising. “Clearly there’s a lot of it,” he says.
For instance, plenty of ads try too hard to be funny and forget that they need to tell a good story,” says Steve O’Connell, partner and executive creative Director at Red Tettemer O’Connell + Partners.
Napier says the worst ads are exaggerated executions made for short-term shock value and show no respect for the consumer. “In essence, it’s creative for creative’s sake.”
According to Horowitz, bad Super Bowl commercials tend to be “too ordinary; not special--something you'd expect to see from the advertiser the other 364 days of the year.” Or, he says, the commercial message “has absolutely nothing to do with product the company is selling.”
Jason Mayo, managing director and partner at Click 3X, says viewers want one or both of two things in a Super Bowl ad: big and/or funny. “If they get neither, they get angry,” he explains. “It's okay to follow a formula for success but there needs to be a spin that speaks to the brand. If there is no connection to the brand, people walk away confused.”
Napier says one brand that has consistently produced bad Super Bowl ads is Go Daddy. “They’ve always taken a lame ‘sex sells’ approach with badly-written schmaltzy humor. But this year they’ve changed this approach so it will be interesting to see how consumers react,” she says.
Steve McKee, president of McKee Wallwork + Company, and author of Power Branding, agrees. “Go Daddy clearly has the worst Super Bowl commercials of all time,” he says. “It would be hard to single one out, because they've all been offensive in a slightly different way. Did they get attention? Sure. But titillation is not a strategy. This year's ad tones things down a bit, though inexplicably still includes Danica Patrick.”
Winchester concurs. “The spots that seem to run every year and take the cake for bad advertising are the Go Daddy spots. Year after year, they simply can’t resist hinting at some slightly pornographic innuendo that exploits women. An advertising strategy to turn off 51% of the population in one fell swoop seems like marketing suicide to me,” he says. “And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Go Daddy creates a spot with a woman making out with a dorky guy in what amounts to 30 seconds of gross-out. Why just denigrate women when you laugh at the stereotype of socially awkward, geeky people? It’s a marketing two-fer.”
The 2013 Go Daddy spot, “When Sexy Meets Smart,” focused on a “nerd” engaged in a long kiss with supermodel Bar Refaeli. “The idea was to generate attention and reinforce the ‘when sexy meets smart’ idea,” says Charles R. Taylor, marketing professor at Villanova School of Business. “While the ad did get noticed, social media action was overwhelmingly negative and the ad was ranked at the bottom of 2013’s ads by experts and consumers alike. The very negative reaction appears to be prompting Go Daddy, which has had outstanding success in building awareness to focus more on it its products and what it stands for going forward. The ad illustrates that getting attention is not always a good thing.”
O’Connell calls the Go Daddy spots “gratuitous, misguided, sexist, universally disliked and just plain bad.” “But hey, those spots got their name out there. And they’re gazillionaires,” he adds. “So it's one of the great enigmas of advertising.”
Another major flop: Groupon’s 2011 “Tibet” spot.
“I barely remember what it was about,” O’Connell says. “Some sort of inappropriate joke about charity I think. At the time, I thought it was fine. But the next day, there were haters everywhere. And they kept multiplying. And that one spot seemed to single-handedly stop this exploding start-up in its tracks. There aren’t many cases where a Super Bowl spot can backfire and do damage to your brand. But unfortunately for the crew involved here, this seemed to be one of them.”
The spot features Timothy Hutton in what appears at first to be a serious spot about the plight of the Tibetan people, “but then goes in a different direction,” says Winchester. “There’s nothing like using a repressed group of people who are in a desperate struggle to sell something as banal as Groupon in a glib, rug-pull that’s exploitative and in bad taste,” he says. “ It amazes me that a spot like this makes it through the entire agency approval process and no one says, ‘Wow, that really sucks.’ And then makes it to the client, who says, ‘Yes! I was hoping you’d bring me something exploitative and racist.’”
Aynes says this spot used a celebrity endorsement to preach about how the very future of Tibet is in trouble and all of its people are in danger—“[but then essentially] says ‘who cares, let’s eat soup!’ It is incredibly offensive and comes off as beyond insensitive.”
Experts also cite Holiday Inn’s “Bob Johnson” ad as one of the worst of all time.
Taylor says Holiday Inn was concerned that consumers were perceiving their brand to be stodgy and downscale—and as a result, they wanted an edgier and more exciting image and hoped to get across the fact that they were investing in remodeling many of their hotels.
“They ran a Super Bowl ad in which Holiday Inn compared itself to a transsexual at a high school reunion. The character, who appears as a female in the ad, catalogues her various plastic surgeries as she saunters through the reunion,” Taylor explains. “Classmates eventually recognize her as Bob Johnson. The narrator then says that if it cost her x money to get this done, and they spend exponentially more on their hotels, won’t that guarantee a wonderful stay alone?”
The commercial was neither popular nor effective and was pulled after a single airing, he says. “It offended many of Holiday Inn’s current customers, who tended to be ‘middle America’ types. Moreover, LGBT groups protested and started a boycott on Holiday Inn. This ad really reinforces the need to do copytesting of the ad on the target audience being sure to include existing customers.”
Aynes says Holiday Inn had yet to do renovations on their locations when this ad came out, so they were “basically comparing their renovations to come to a sex change operation which is a little strange in itself, but to advertise before you can even get people in the door for at least six months is a little irresponsible.”
Other Super Bowl ads that just didn’t resonate with viewers: Dirt Devil’s 1997 “Fred Astaire dances with the (Dirt) Devil.”
“Fred Astaire had been dead for about 10 years when the commercial was made and it creeped people out,” Aynes says.
McKee says Bud Bowl (as a series) comes in second for him. “Contrived cartoon competition in the midst of the world's greatest contest--how does that make sense? When the teasers are the best part of a campaign, you know you've flopped.”
One of Mayo’s top picks for the worst ads of all time: SoBe Life Water’s 2008 "Thrillicious" spot. “The ad involved Naomi Campbell and dancing lizards,” he explains. “SoBe scored the right talent but there was no chemistry with the CGI lizards. We know these kinds of ads can be successful because GEICO has been doing it well for years. It just felt like a knock off with poor execution.”
Winchester agrees. “It has all the elements but I watch it and I feel like someone slipped a hallucinogen in my bean dip. And not in a good way. It also has what a lot of bad Super Bowl spots have in common: you forget them (thankfully), which may be the biggest criticism you can level at something that costs $4 million to run.”
Napier wasn’t particularly fond of Miller Lite’s “Evil Beaver” from 1997 or Outpost.com’s 1998 “Gerbil” spot.
“Miller Lite was beyond horrible in the 90s,” she says. “Their series of spots was so bad it’s beyond words. Basically, they made meaningless trash and sold it as ‘surrealism.’”
Outpost.com is now defunct—“but the animal cruelty thing was crazy,” she says. “They tried to create stopping power through firing gerbils at a wall through a cannon, and at the end of the day, you didn’t remember the brand, you didn’t remember what they did – and if you did, you kinda hated them for it.”
She says Chevy’s 2012 “Apocalypse” is another one of the worst Super Bowl ads of all time. “Chevy spent a lot of money to make a very basic point – but we already knew Chevy’s are reliable from their ‘Like a Rock’ campaign. It seems there should’ve been a smarter, simpler way to get there that would’ve had more impact.”
Taylor's top picks for worst Super Bowl ads of all time include Ameriquest’s “Flight Accident” (2006) and TaxAct.com’s 2012 “Free to Pee.”
The Ameriquest ad shows a woman needing to use the bathroom on a plane and trying to politely get out from the window seat over two men she is sitting next to. As she gets up turbulence hits and she lands on top of the man in the aisle seat in a compromising position. The tagline then appears: “Don’t Judge Too Quickly.”
“While this ad is funny and was ranked highly on USA Today, consumers did not remember it as an ad for a mortgage company, as “Ameriquest” does not appear until the last frame of the ad. Some research I am working on shows that it did nothing to do the brand which makes sense given that it says nothing about the company and its product and the link between ‘Don’t Judge Too Quickly’ and the company is not clear,” Taylor explains.
O’Connell chose H&M’s David Beckham spot as a least favorite. “You’ve got one of the most celebrated, and dare I say gorgeous, athletes in the world. And you took the expected, easy way out. If you try for something great and don’t quite make it, at least you gave it a shot. But this spot didn’t even feel like it tried.”
Another fail, according to O’Connell: Bud Light Platinum’s 2012 spot. “Or was it Bronze? Or Titanium? Who knows,” he says. “It was about some metal beer. And all it featured was the bottle for 30 seconds with some high tech engraving. Who cares? It offered nothing of interest. And given the brand is clearly capable of doing such great things, it was a disappointment. Ironically, the size of the disappointment made it memorable for me.”
Con Williamson, chief creative officer of Erwin Penland says: “While I'm being asked to be critical, it's a bit unfair to the creators of the work. I have seen great ideas go into meetings, and come out drastically changed thanks to way too many opinions taking effect. Because it's the Super Bowl, everyone wants to make their mark on the work, and by the end what we see is the result of a giant group overthink.”
Other Super Bowl ads that flopped: Apple’s “Lemmings” (1985), SalesGenie.com’s “Pandas” (2008), GM’s “Robot” (2007) and Lifeminders.com’s ad from 2000.
“The absolute worst failures are actually the ones we can't remember at all,” says Ammiel Kamon, executive vice president of product and marketing at Kontera. “That is truly worst than having a bad flop that people actually talk about. In that sense, we can't really remember and certainly can't name brands that were failures,” he concludes.
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