Super Bowl Special

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There is good reason why a thirty-second commercial during the Super Bowl costs millions of dollars: Except for 1983 (when it lost to the M*A*S*H finale), the Super Bowl has always, without question, been the most watched program of the entire calendar year in America. If you're blowing half your annual advertising budget on just getting the spot, the commercial better be pretty damned good. And many are. This is so well known that many people watch the Super Bowl just for the commercials, creating the advertiser's dream: a three hour block of time where over ninety million people tune in to watch advertisements.

Many ad campaigns are debuted at the Super Bowl. The commercials are generally given a much bigger budget, and quite a few include celebrity cameos. Most will utilize a funny twist ending intended, as many commercials do, to help you remember the product or service being sold (although sometimes this doesn't always work out). Many also go sexy (which can cause Distracted by the Sexy to occur on occasion), each year being more titillating than the last... or so they did until the infamous "Wardrobe Malfunction" at Super Bowl XXXVIII. For even more meta-flavor, some commercials will recall commercials from years past.

Almost invariably, each year's crop of commercials will be called worse than last year's crop.

These days, organizations will sometimes deliberately create commercials that will be rejected, usually for being too sexy, for the publicity 'that' generates. The commercial is then of course put online, where it will quickly generate a million hits.

This would also be a good time to note that the NFL has trademarked the name Super Bowl, which is why you almost never hear anyone mention it in commercials. Generally, you'll hear "The Big Game" instead, or a gag name like "That game at the start of February where the professional football championship is contested". Or, since the 2010s, you'll hear about a "Superb Owl." The league itself runs an ad during the broadcast, often thanking its fans for their patronage during the season that is ending. And, of course, the network that airs the game itself gets plenty of free air time to promote the crap out of their big shows, the biggest of which will likely be airing a special episode right after the Big Game.

If this wasn't enough to show that Super Bowl commercials are Serious Business, note that the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University rates the commercials every year as to whether they're effective in selling their products and services.

A similar, worldwide version of this is the FIFA World Cup Special: since the FIFA World Cup is the most watched sports event in the entire world, the mid-time ads are where the world's biggest mega-corporations pull out their BFGs.

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Memorable Super Bowl commercials include

• Super Bowl II: "It's a miracle," thanks to Xerox. Before they first ran the ad, Xerox asked the Archbishop of New York whether it was blasphemous - the Archbishop laughed and gave it his blessing.
• Apple's 1984 commercial (directed by Ridley Scott) introducing the Mac, aired in... 1984. This is the ad that started the Super Bowl commercial craze. It's also considered to be one of the best commercials of all time, if not the best.
  • Showing they couldn't capture lightning in a bottle twice in a row, Apple's 1985 commercial, "Lemmings", insulted their customer base so thoroughly that Steve Jobs was forced to resign from the company. When it aired in the stadium, it resulted in what Apple CEO John Sculley later said must have been the only completely silent moment in Super Bowl history. The sequel was also a memorable commercial, but for exactly the opposite reasons.
  • Motorola did a Take That to Apple and their 1984 ad with their 2011 ad for the Xoom, a tablet competing with the iPad.
• Pick a Budweiser ad campaign, and it's quite likely that it got its start at the Super Bowl. The frogs, the lizards, the Clydesdales, The Bud Bowl, the "Wazzuuuuuuup" guys...all Super Bowl commercials.
• Pepsi's ads have also been quite memorable. The line of commercials with Hallie Kate Eisenberg started there, as did the Britney Spears line.
  • Diet Pepsi's may have been even more memorable, including several ads featuring Cindy Crawford, and one ad spoofing that series (with Cindy Crawford herself checking out a Diet Pepsi-drinking guy...and later, so did one of the Queer Eye guys).
  • One 1997 Super Bowl commercial for Pepsi had a group of grizzly bears...dancing and miming to a version of "YMCA" by the Village People.
• Coca-Cola has had many impressive Super Bowl commercials, too. During Super Bowl VI, Coca-Cola taught the world to sing (in perfect harmony). Then there's their Super Bowl XIV spot, often considered the best Super Bowl commercial of all time, featuring "Mean Joe" Greene—which spawned a trope of its own. The Happiness Factory ads, meanwhile, started out as the 2006 Germany FIFA World Cup Special.
  • In 2009, Coca-Cola spoofed the Mean Joe Greene ad with Troy Polamalu.
  • The "Los Cocacoleros" ad, featuring a We Didn't Start the Billy Joel Parodies cover, was also a FIFA World Cup Special.
• In recent years^[when?], GoDaddy.com has made a name for itself making blatantly suggestive ads, such as their Super Bowl XLVII ad in 2013. In fact, they get so caught up in trying to be risque that the product tends to be overlooked - they're in the extremely sexy...domain-name registrar business.
  • In 2008 they pulled the stunt of posting a Too Hot for TV ad online and hyping that with the actual TV spots. But it's worth noting that most of the steaminess was actually broadcast; the web version is just longer.
• Terry Tate, Office Linebacker.
  • ::CRASH:: GET OFF TVTROPES AND GET BACK TO WORK, BITCH! WOO WOO!
  • This commercial was so popular that Terry Tate essentially became a playable character in Gears of War.
  • The Terry Tate commercials manage to get an awful lot of crap past the radar, including Terry's repeated Curses Cut Short and his boss being named Mr. Felcher.
• One Nissan commercial had a squadron of pigeons chasing it down, trying to poop on it, chasing it through, among other things, a sidewalk café and a wedding, all with Kenny Loggins's "Danger Zone" from the Top Gun soundtrack blaring.
  • They also did the ad where G.I. Joe picks up Barbie (to Ken's dismay) to the Van Halen version of "You Really Got Me".
• One Doritos commercial consisted of a guy using a Dorito chip as bait in a mousetrap, and sitting in front of it. He takes a bite from a handful of Doritos, and a giant mouse blasts through the wall and tackles the guy sitting, and proceeds to punch him in the face.
• In 2000, eTrade showed two guys and a monkey in a garage, with a boom box playing "La Cucaracha". That's pretty much it. The tag line: "Well, we just wasted two million bucks. What are you doing with your money?"
• In 2005, FedEx tried to make the best Super Bowl ad by combining elements of other successful ads:
  1. Celebrity (Burt Reynolds)
  2. Animal (a bear)
  3. DANCING animal (the bear starts to dance with Burt)
  4. Cute kid ("Wow, that bear can dance!")
  5. Groin kick (Self Explanatory)
  6. Talking Animal ("Sorry, Mr. Reynolds.")
  7. Attractive females ("Wow, that bear can talk!")
  8. Product message (optional) (Burt delivers the tagline)
  9. Famous pop song ("Don't Stop Believing")
  10. Bonus ending (Bear: "I loved you in Smokey and the Bandit.")
• Snickers got in trouble with gay rights groups for the 2007 Superbowl ad where two male mechanics share a Spaghetti Kiss over a Snickers bar, then try to de-gay themselves by "doing something manly". The ad had alternate endings available online; the one that aired showed them ripping out their chest hair, while one online version had them violently attack each other.
• "Carrier Pigeons": In 2008 (Super Bowl XLII), FedEx ran an ad in which someone at a business firm proposed using carrier pigeons for shipping. For large items, they already had giant carrier pigeons. Mayhem ensued.
• In 2008, Mexico had a salty crackers ad where a Chinese boy in a Mexican family wonders if he's adopted, only to have his question shrugged off by the family talking about the crackers. The 2008 Beijing Olympics Special was the same commercial, but reversed: a Mexican boy in a Chinese family was wondering if he's adopted. For even more bonus points, the entire commercial was spoken in unsubtitled Chinese, and yet it was perfectly understandable.
• For Super Bowl XLIII, PETA wanted to run an ad that would encourage people to go vegan. It has been denied airtime by the Super Bowl ad committee, cited as being too sexy. Look for yourself.
  • That's exactly their plan; they win either way. Note that a gory guiltfest follows it unless you navigate away.
• Don't forget the Doritos ad from Super Bowl XLIII. The one where the boss gets hit in the groin by a snowglobe at the end.
  • The Doritos-Samurai-Ninja, with Doritos shuriken and Flail.
• In 2009, Cash4Gold.com, previously known for its late-night basic cable ads that look like they were shot on VHS in 1986, ran a Super Bowl ad starring Ed McMahon and MC Hammer. Cue much Black Comedy on the state of the economy...
  • To make this Harsher in Hindsight, Cash 4 Gold has been exposed as little more than a gold-stealing scam, meaning that they used the Super Bowl to put one over on all of America at once.
• During the dot-com bubble, Super Bowl advertising was almost totally consumed by random websites selling useless services, who folded shortly afterward (likely, because they blew a year's budget on a Super Bowl ad and people still didn't know what they sold). The most famous of these, by far, was the Pets.com sock puppet, which has been spoofed ruthlessly in years since.
  • In a weird move, that exact puppet has been selling Bar None insurance for more than half a decade^[when?], arguably longer than it actually existed as the spokespuppet for Pets.com.
  • Referenced in this E*Trade commercial (excuse the quality), where the monkey from the previous year rides on horseback through Desolation Shots of failed fictional dot-com bubble businesses, concluding with a sockpuppet (resembling the aforementioned Pets.com puppet) from a demolishing-in-progress "eSocks.com" building thrown at the monkey's feet. Cue crying monkey.
• In 2010, the controversy was over an ad bought by Focus On The Family featuring Tim Tebow and his mother, and how grateful she was to have chosen life over an abortion. CBS, the Tebows, and Focus on the Family have all come under fire for this, especially when it is considered that Mrs. Tebow was living in the Philippines, a country that bans abortions, at the time she supposedly considered one.
  • The controversy was further inflamed when news media picked up on two pro-gay ads (one by a church, one by a dating site) were rejected for inappropriateness. The main question being how Standards and Practices could neutrally pass the Tebow ad but reject the gay ads.
  • The controversy was doubly further inflamed when Mrs. Tebow revealed that doctors had advised her to have the abortion for medical reasons. At that time, all but the most staunch pro-life advocates would keep abortions legal when the mother's life was at risk, undermining the message of the ad.
  • The controversy was diminished once people actually saw the ad. Ooh, how offensive.
• For 2010, HomeAway.com showed a trailer for a mini-movie follow-up on the Vacation series called Hotel Hell Vacation, with Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo reprising their respective roles of Clark and Ellen Griswold. The film can be viewed here.
• Boost Mobile, for XLIV, reunites the Chicago Bears Shufflin' Crew for a 25th anniversary followup of their Super Bowl Shuffle, called the Boost Mobile Shuffle. Of course, to save airtime, they aired a 30 second preview of the song, which concludes with the Crew saying, "Go online to find the rest of our jam."
• The 2010 Kiss Dr. Pepper ad, co-staring Little Kiss, a KISS tribute band authorized by KISS, made up of midgets.
• Also in 2010, the Google ad "Parisian Love".
  • Doubles as a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming.
• The 'Cat herders' commercial.
  • The same company did try to top that the next year, with building airplanes. In the sky. So, between a commercial showing cat herders and skydiving aerospace mechanics, could you guess that they're a company that does IT maintenance and database program development?
• And who could forget the long-running but little-changed MasterLock "Shoot the Lock" (my term) ads? Here's their 1974's ad.
• Believe it or not, there was an ad for Clerks the Animated Series in the Super Bowl of 2000. It was moderately funny. The ad is available on the DVD, or you can watch it at viewaskew.com.
• This Nuveen Investments' commercial in 2000, set Twenty Minutes Into the Future. Mankind has made significant progress, having cured AIDS and Cancer, and is currently having an award ceremony for the breakthroughs in fixing spinal cord injuries. One of the guests presenting the award? None other than Christopher Reeve, up and about again. A wonderful case of Doing It for the Art.
  • This ad also created a bit of a stir, and is often cited as either one of the best Super Bowl ads ever, or one of the worst. The Reveal of a walking Christopher Reeve was rather surprising, and some people (who apparently missed the parts about AIDS and cancer being cured) thought it was real. They were disheartened to realize that Reeve was still in his wheelchair, and felt that Nuveen was giving people false hope.
• FIFA example: Possibly the most elaborate commercial ever made, "Write the Future" is a Nike ad which follows several famous players and shows how one errant pass or spectacular save can change the man's whole life. Includes several Crowning Moments of Funny for good measure.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Every single player featured in that commercial was either dropped from their national team or eliminated in the Round of 16. "Write the Future" indeed.
    • Except for the three Spanish players (Cesc Fabregas, Andres Iniesta and Gerard Pique), who won the World Cup.
• In 2010, Dockers premiered an ad which opened with a bunch of guys marching heroically through a field, clad only in shirts and underwear, proudly singing a song by California folk band the Poxy Boggards, called "I Wear No Pants." The ad cut to a shot of a model wearing Dockers' khakis and a voice intoning, "Calling all men -- it's time to wear the pants."
• The 2010 Super Bowl commercial for Kia cars was cute (a gang of giant, living toys goes on a fun road trip to Las Vegas), but it almost got the company in serious trouble because of an NFL rule that bans showing gambling and casinos during the broadcast.
• The Super Bowl's current^[when?] proximity to Valentine's Day actually has worked in the favor of online floral clearinghouse Teleflora, who in 2009 and 2010 made commercials with "bad box" flowers berating the recipient with how much of a cheapskate the flower-buyer was. The 2010 commercial featured Don Rickles as the voice of the bad flowers.
  • Teleflora also got in hot water when one of the ads had the rude flowers telling its recipient, "No one wants to see you naked!"
• "Miller High Life!"
  • Yup, an ad that ran less than three seconds, and just had the main character of the ad campaign (a black delivery guy in a khaki uniform, who in other ads of the campaign delivered Miller High Life to stores) state the name of the product. This piggy-backed off an earlier ad during the NFL playoffs in which the character was confused on why companies needed 30 seconds to pitch their products.
• The Super Bowl XLV commercial for the Chrysler 200 was seen as a Crowning Moment of Awesome for Detroit, Eminem, and Chrysler.
• Super Bowl XLV also had the Volkswagen Passat ad where a kid dressed as Darth Vader tries using "The Force" on everything and failing until his dad helps him with Forcing the car to start. Doubly a Crowning Moment of Funny and Crowning Moment of Heartwarming, and, even better, is immediately obvious what they are selling, and what feature you'll remember.
  • This got referenced the next year as a Stinger to another Volkswagen ad, which involves a dog losing weight so he could go through a pet door and run alongside the advertised car. The commercial ends and we see that it was being watched in the Mos Eisley cantina, where one of the patrons says he liked it better than the Vader commercial. Cue the real Vader showing up and force-choking him.
• Never, ever, tease a pug with Doritos.
  • Never, ever, tease a granny and a baby in a sling-jumper with Doritos.
• Garmin's Super Bowl XLI commercial is a Shout-Out to Ultraman.
• Super Bowl XXIII had an unsuccessful attempt for Diet Coke in which they had heavily publicized an ad airing before that game's halftime show that was to be the first spot produced in 3-D (this being January 1989). The ad and subsequent "Bebop Bamboozled" show flopped miserably (Here is the ad itself; bookended by NBC Sports' icon Bob Costas making snarky comments.)
  • A more successful commercial was produced for American Express; which teamed Saturday Night Live stars Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey traveling to Miami for the game only for Lovitz (apparently stuck with Visa) having to rely on Carvey to pay his way because his card wasn't accepted, ultimately winning the inaugural USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter.
• For Super Bowl XLVI...
  • Chevrolet ran an ad taking place After the End of 2012, with a Chevrolet truck emerging from the debris, driving through the Scenery Gorn, and regrouping with other survivors, all set to Barry Manilow's "Looks Like We Made It".
  • XLVI also saw the TV debut of Ms. Brown, M&M's latest Mascot.
  • Coca-Cola introduced a unique ad featuring its polar bears (one representing each team in the Super Bowl) reacting to the current game action, including a website where visitors could take a peek at the bears' real-time reactions to the game at hand. (And the commercials at hand - including yawning at the PepsiCo ads.)
  • Kia premiered a commercial for the Optima, wherein a man gets accidentally buried in dream dust and winds up fantasizing about Motley Crue playing a concert while he races his car around a track in front of a crowd of bikini babes. Then it subverts the traditional Sex Sells setup by having the man bust into his wife's dream and take her away from the Mr. Fanservice she was with. Commentators praised it for being one of the only commercials to show a man wanting to spend time with his wife. Then Kia chopped the last part off when they put it into normal rotation, cutting out the Subversion.
  • Honda gave us a commercial Homage to Ferris Bueller's Day Off...complete with Matthew Broderick as the star.
• Memorable for all the wrong reasons was the 1999 Super Bowl XXXIII ad run by Just For Feet. Quoting Wikipedia: "[A] Humvee of white men tracks a Kenyan runner. The men offer the runner a cup of water spiked with a sedative; the runner collapses, and the men force a pair of Nike sneakers onto his feet. The runner wakes up, notices that he now has sneakers on his feet, screams, and runs away, attempting to shake the shoes off." After the ad aired, the company's CEO said he was pressured by the ad agency into running the ad. Just for Feet sued the ad agency, but went bankrupt before the case made it to court.
• That isn't to say that all the commercials in Super Bowl XXXIII were bad - far from it. When I grow up was not only Monster.com's first Super Bowl commercial, but also their first TV commercial ever, and it quintupled their business.
• In 2015, Always' "Like a Girl" Super Bowl ad won an Emmy.
• 2017's "Cleaner of your dreams" was the Super Bowl's top-ranked commercial.
• More missteps:
  • "Lost Puppy", GoDaddy's 2015 ad, was a spoof of Budweiser's "animal" ads that annoyed animal lovers.
  • Groupon's Timothy Hutton Tibet ad from 2011 was supposed to say "donate to charity the money you save by using our coupons", but what people took away from the ad was a human-rights crisis being mocked. Groupon fired its ad agency and didn't run a Super Bowl ad again until 2018.

Playing with the Trope:

• Defied in 2019 by Skittles, who instead of buying a 30-second ad spot, staged a 30-minute Broadway play that ran exactly once, during the Big Game. It drew more eyes than any of the "event" commercials did that year.

Fictional examples of Super Bowl Specials include:

Web Comics

• Arthur, King of Time and Space, referenced here and then subverted here.
• Kevin and Kell gives us seven Bland-Name Products being advertised during its universe's Super Bowl in 2012. Rudy complains that he watches the show for the game.

Western Animation

• In the second episode of Futurama, Professor Farnsworth pays for a Planet Express commercial to air during the Super Bowl. "Not on the same channel, of course."