Super Bored Awards 2023

I have a confession to make: I didn't actually watch that much of this year's Super Bowl.  I basically watched the second quarter, the halftime show, and then the last ten minutes or so.  There are a variety of reasons for this which I won't bore you with, but the upshot is that I didn't see that many ads live, and in the moment I remember thinking, "Huh, the ads aren't that bad this year."  So I wasn't going to bother to make a post at all, but then I thought, "Eh, maybe I should go back and see what else ran, and record my thoughts, because nothing says prime content time like a post on Super Bowl ads a week-plus after the game on a blog that now apparently makes one post a year."

Whatever. Here we go. (In any event, if I accidentally reference an ad that didn't air or didn't initially air during the game, it's because I had to rely on someone else's list of what was a Super Bowl ad.)

The Apple 1984 Memorial Award for Least Shitty Ad

I feel like this isn't normally the kind of ad I'd pick here, but this one just worked for me:

To be frank, I barely know who Jack Harlow is. But you have to give it to this ad: it has some good visual gags, a few decent jokes, Harlow sells his lines fairly well for a non-actor, the punchline plays, and the ad manages to make it clear what it's actually for right up front and again at the end. It's not brilliant or anything, but when it comes to Super Bowl ads the bar is fairly low.

Runners-Up: I'm sure a lot of people would have picked one of the two sappy dog ads here (only one of which was for actual dog food), but they were a bit much for me. The Amazon one doesn't make that much sense as an ad for Amazon (though I recognize they're beyond needing to do that, as a brand) and as for the Farmer's Dog, the less said about "I apparently love my dog more than my baby" the better.

The Actual 1984 Award for Most Dystopian Ad

There are only a handful of companies who could possibly win an award like this, which I felt moved to create specially for Google:

There are a lot of problems with this ad, starting with the fact that all the photos that need to be "fixed" pretty transparently look like they had the "problems" edited into them in the first place. I'm additionally wary of what kind of AI control over your photos would be required to effectively "unblur" them. But also... remember how in Soviet Russia, the Communist Party would edit photos to remove former key party members who later ran afoul of Stalin or other top brass and had to be disappeared? That's now a thing that a tech company is touting as a key feature of its cell phones. Cute? (And why did this ad need to be 90 seconds long? Did you think I wouldn't get the "erase your ex" joke unless Amy Schumer was there to explain it to me?)

Most Overproduced Ad

As ever, there are about 500 contenders for this one, but I settled on Kia.

That's a lot of driving and helicopter shots - many of which are shot at a pretty good distance from the car, which seems to kind of defeat the purpose of a car ad - all to end up at the single most predictable punchline that maybe any ad had this year (and there were quite a few).

Runner-Up: The production on this Workday ad isn't super high (it's not like that's an actual crowd behind Paul Stanley) but it's still a lot of arenas and mansions all for a single joke that, not for nothing, puts all of its eggs into the basket of "shitting on the people who use your product." I can barely tell what Workday is from watching it, and it refers to people who are already using Workday, so the implication is they spent "60 second Super Bowl ad money" on making fun of their own user base. Sure!

Cheapest Budget/Clumsiest Execution Award

And for the exact opposite of too much production, there's TurboTax:

Credit for paying the royalties for a song people would recognize, I guess.

Runner-Up: The Oikos ad featuring Deion Sanders and various members of his family, only some of whom appear to be Sanders in old-man makeup, is just kind of baffling. Am I supposed to know or care who these people are? And what did this have to do with yogurt?

Worst Use of "Humor" Award

In a true irony, one of the few celebrity ads to center itself on an honest-to-God comedian somehow turned out to be the least funny!

When the first Austin Powers movie did this joke - TWENTY-SIX MOTHERFUCKING YEARS AGO - it was funny. And to be clear, it was funny primarily because it was a parade of dick jokes. This takes the joke structure and changes the dick jokes to... the names of some famous people. It really is the apotheosis of Super Bowl advertising to put out a commercial where every "punchline" is literally just yelling the name of a celebrity appearing in the ad. It's also about as funny as the stomach cramps David Ortiz is going to get from that Kevin Hart cheese head. (Also, fuck sports betting apps.)

Runner-Up: There's a million, of course, but the "not that kind of shelter, Sarah" joke in the Busch ad is truly dire. Commercials asking you to remember other commercials are also just annoying. I couldn't give this an award though because I do like Sarah McLachlan's scared acting at the end.

Flimsiest Pretense Award

Avocados from Mexico rewound even further this year. All the way to the Garden of Eden. And hey, remember what the people in the Garden of Eden were?

This is the long version of the ad, so I'm guessing it might be a little more risque than the one that actually aired, but with this premise I'm sure there was plenty of skin on the airwaves on Super Bowl Sunday. We have to give them some credit: there's way more "buff male model" semi-nudity in this one than "sexy hot babe" semi-nudity, so at least that's equal opportunity ogling compared to many years in the past. But then you have to go out on a "looking right up at the Statue of Liberty's you-know-what" joke, so all points are forfeited.

Runner-Up: As I noted last year, the "sexy babes sell you a thing" ads are kind of a thing of the past, and just as well. So there's really no other ad that jumps out here.

The Rick Dalton Award for the Most Egregious Use of B-List Celebrities

There were several ads, including the DraftKings one already mentioned, that were really just a parade of cameos. But you gotta go with Uber One here:

When you go out of your way to build your ad around several 90s one-hit wonders, that is PRETTY egregious. But the "What Does the Fox Say" guys, a decade later? That puts this over the top.

Runner-Up: Downy building an entire ad around Danny McBride of all people, and then not even really trying to make it funny, is right up there.

Ironically, this year I felt like I needed to add a separate category for this one:

The Jack Nicholson Award for the Most Egregious Use of A-List Celebrities

Shockingly, this might have been a tougher award to hand out than the Dalton. Brie Larson and Jon Hamm talking about how their names sound like food? Ben Affleck getting scolded by Jennifer Lopez in the Dunkin drive-thru? Ordinarily J-Lo shilling for DD would do it for me, but since Affleck's affinity for Dunkin' Donuts is well-known and legitimate, I think we have to give it to T-Mobile:

Not only is there absolutely no reason for John Travolta to appear in this or any ad, but it's especially creepy because he could not look less like John Travolta these days. You really had to have him do a song from Grease just so it would be clear who this new neighbor even was.

Runner-Up: I actually don't think it's that terrible of an ad, but building an entire minute-long spot around Miles Teller dancing takes chutzpah.

The Bad Idea Jeans Award for Most Epic Miscalculation

E-Trade. Not because they did something scandalous like past winners of this award... but... well, maybe they did.

I'm trying to think of anything I wanted less than the return of the E-Trade baby. And it was definitely another ad that put babies in conspicuously adult situations so they'd end up making comments implying babies trying to get laid. The "you must be 18 to use E-Trade" fine print at the end is kind of the icing on this particular cake, although the fact that you can barely tell what E-Trade is from this ad, meaning they're relying almost entirely on "public goodwill for the E-Trade baby" as a product pitch, is also incredibly troubling.

SkyMall Championship Trophy for Weirdest Attempt to Sell a Product

I can envision how this ad was created.

"Okay it's time to come up with Remy Martin's Super Bowl ad. What have you got?"

"Okay uh..." *spins wheel* "...Serena Williams."

"...uh huh?"

"Ummm..." *throws dart* "...gives Al Pacino's Any Given Sunday speech?"

At least there's a connection to football, I guess?

Runner-Up: I already went at these Pringles ads last year, but this year's manages to be even worse somehow.

Worst Super Bowl Ad of 2023

When you know, you know. And I knew as soon as I saw this ad that I could not possibly hate it more.

If only those were B-list celebs fighting, this could have ticked nearly every box. It's dramatically overproduced, with unnecessary references to 25-year-old movies. It's substantially longer than it has any need or right to be. It's not funny. But most importantly, the only thing that almost does qualify as a joke in this ad is the "punchline" that... it's actually an ad for Blue Moon. That's right, the joke is that all these brands are actually owned by the same mega-conglomerate and the fight was all kayfabe in the first place. I suppose Miller Lite has been on this corner for decades (the idea of people fighting over whether it mattered more that Miller Lite "tasted great" or was "less filling" somehow sustained us for years in the 80s) but I just could not find oligopoly less funny in this day and age.

Super Bored Awards 2022

Truth be told, I was super bored during this year's Super Bowl.  Aside from the start of the third quarter, it wasn't that exciting of a game despite coming down to the wire.  The halftime show was okay but we've certainly seen more energetic performances.  And then there were the ads.  Oh boy.  Let's hand out some awards, shall we?

The Apple 1984 Memorial Award for Least Shitty Ad

This is always a very difficult one to choose.  And I don't mean because it's a crowded field.  But I decided to go with the following ad for Midwest Express Clinic:

 

This is actually a very strange ad.  For one thing, it's local to the Chicagoland area.  That's not the strange part - the strange part is selecting Marshawn Lynch as a pitchman.  Sure, Lynch is a famous football player who should be known to most or all of the audience watching the Super Bowl.  But he has ZERO association with Chicago or the Midwest.  Aside from three-plus years with the Buffalo Bills, his career has been entirely contained in the Pacific time zone - he's from Oakland, went to Cal, and is best known for playing in Seattle.  He also hasn't played a full season since 2017 and hasn't taken a handoff in more than two years.  Not exactly top of mind.  But then, this is a commercial for Midwest Express Clinic.  So if you can't find a local Chicago athlete willing to shill for urgent care, hey, why not?  Lynch has been doing some acting recently and his comedic delivery isn't bad, and the idea of a big tough football player burning himself while making fancy coffee is, if fairly trite, still passably amusing.  I wouldn't put this up there with previous winners of this award like Google's Parisian Love, but the bar was pretty low this year.  

Runner-up: Google's ad for the Pixel 6, touting its ability to properly capture darker skin tones in photos.  The ad looks good and the message is obviously laudable, but I have a hard time getting fully on board with Google taking a lap for something that's decades overdue.

Most Overproduced Ad

Lot of contenders for this one, as usual.  This may also be a slightly left-field choice, but I'm going with Avocados from Mexico:

 

Was this the most wildly overproduced ad of the day?  Nah.  For one thing, it isn't loaded with awful TV-grade CGI.  There's no big explosions, nothing.  However: an awful lot of effort must have gone into wrangling all these costumes and extras.  And for what?  A couple of B-grade jokes based on the by now incredibly hoary Super Bowl ad concept of "what if thing from today but in the past"... and that's basically it.  I won't even get into the fact that "Mexico" even as a concept (let alone a sovereign nation) was a good 15 centuries away at the time this ad is ostensibly set.  One decent joke and I might have been able to forgive the needless premise, but I can't.  So that's an overproduced ad, to me.

Runner-up: The Nissan ad with Eugene Levy has way too much going on, particularly in the back half, but it does more plot-wise to justify its existence and Levy actually looks shockingly believable as an action hero - I kinda want that movie now.

Cheapest Budget/Clumsiest Execution Award

This one is obvious:

 

This thing was so cheap I could only find a secondhand video of it on YouTube.  The only disappointment with this ad is that it apparently worked - I don't know who is scanning random QR codes off their TV screens, but Coinbase's app evidently crashed not long after this ad aired, meaning either a fair number of people did that or it's a shitty app.  (Or, you know, both.)  I know Super Bowl ad space is very expensive, but if this is all you can afford to do, maybe you should have just saved up for next year.  (Just kidding, none of these crypto companies will exist next year.)

Runner-up: The Polestar EV ad obviously had a pretty cheap budget, and indeed the ad's concept is built around "we didn't spend a lot on this ad," but it's a totally fine ad otherwise and isn't hateable crypto shit.

Worst Use of "Humor" Award

Again, this could have been about a 50-way tie.  But I have to give it to Michelob for this sub-sub-vaudeville shit:

 

30 seconds cost $7 million and that's what you fucking did with it?  I have to write this whole thing out just to really ram the point home:

Brooks Koepka (by the way: did you know this was Brooks Koepka? +5 additional points if you don't even know who Brooks Koepka is): "So what's the play?"

Caddy: "All right - let's go with Michelob Ultra Organic Seltzer.  It has zero sugar."

Koepka: "Really."

Caddy: "Yeah. And... zero carbs."

Koepka: "Zero."

Caddy: "Yeah, zero."

Koepka: "Really."

Caddy: "Yeah, really."

Koepka: "Zero?"

Caddy: "Zero."

Third base!  This falls squarely in the category of "I can tell from the tone that you're trying to be funny, but nothing you're saying is actually recognizable as a joke," an all too common mainstay of national advertising. Honestly, what is even supposed to be the joke here?  I mean aside from the idea that it was worth casting Brooks Koepka, who isn't even a good enough actor to sell one-word lines.  I suppose maybe the idea is just that Michelob wanted to really hit the "zero" point regarding its product, but seriously, we fucking got it.

Caddy: "And did I mention it's organic?"

Koepka: "Yeah.  First thing you said." [turns to nonexistent bartender and holds up one finger]

I... hope that bar only sells Michelob Ultra Organic Seltzer?  I guess the joke, in the end, is that Koepka remembered the "organic" part even though he needed to have zero repeated to him 75 times... but that's far too mild a joke to save something this tedious.

Runner-up: Again, too many options to count, but I gotta go with Carvana's "Oversharing Mom" because I am just endlessly tired of the "person who used the product is shown to be incredibly annoying even in the world of the ad" commercials.  Why is that your idea???  "That's right, using Carvana is so good it will... turn you into someone literally everyone hates.  Carvana!"  You could put this ad in other categories for that reason, but I'm mentioning it here because it's also got a lot of "we're giving this a tone like it's funny but there aren't any actual jokes" vibes going on, and extra negative points for shit like "look at all our wacky visual images like a man pruning a topiary bush!  Isn't that just silly?"  No.  It's not.

Flimsiest Pretense Award

In something of an upset... I really don't think any ad this year tried to sell its product using sex!  Like, at all!  Maybe this is a post-MeToo thing - I haven't done these awards in seven years, after all - but I've looked through all the ads multiple times and I'm just not seeing it.  A decade ago, the "Fortune" character in the DraftKings ad would probably have been an SI swimsuit model in something revealing, instead of a more or less regular-looking woman in biker-type garb.  We've got Dolly Parton making a punny allusion to her famous bosom, but it's not exactly sexualized.  The closest I think we're gonna get here is Pringles:

 

Specifically, the barely more than a second-long clip halfway through the ad in which a couple are clearly in the leadup to getting down.  It's probably a stretch to call it "Flimsiest Pretense" since it is of a piece with the overall structure of the ad, which is not itself using sex to sell the product, but we didn't need to see a snippet of this couple's pre-coitus to understand how they got from a wedding in the previous scene to a baby in the next, so it's at least mildly gratuitous.  At any rate, it's no more of a stretch than the ad's overall concept, which apparently posits that it is illegal to turn a Pringles can more than 90 degrees horizontally.  (Also, yet another example of "Here's a thing about our product which is bad."  Cool idea!)

The Carlos Mencia Book Prize for the Most Egregious Use of B-List Celebrities

Honestly, the reference for the name of this award is itself so out of date it could have appeared in one of this year's ads.  I'm calling an audible and renaming this one The Rick Dalton Award, because the only reason ads bother to get mid-tier famous people in their ads is the hope that viewers will do this:

Needless to say, this is yet another award that could go to at least half a dozen contenders, but I don't see how I could spurn Planet Fitness here:

 

Danny Trejo is both a Super Bowl ad veteran and a veteran of playing himself, so it's no surprise to see him pop up in an ad that demands moderate levels of recognizability.  But what really takes this one home is that between Lohan, William Shatner, and Dennis Rodman, this ad would have been a virtual shoo-in for this award at any point in the last decade and possibly longer - Lohan, around whom the ad is built as though she's at the peak of her tabloid fame, hasn't been in a film that got a significant theatrical release since 2010, for crying out loud, and hasn't been the star of one since 2007.  America is a real "once you're famous, you're famous" country, but my first thought if Lindsay Lohan suddenly started appearing on Jeopardy would not be "What's gotten into Lindsay?" but "Wow, where'd they dig her up from?"  Rodman hasn't been especially relevant for even longer, and bonus points because his part in this ad could have been played by literally anyone you've ever heard of, meaning it really is just a cheap "We said someone's name and they showed up!" throwaway even more than the ad itself is.

For bonus points, throw in actual Jeopardy contestant and later part-time host Buzzy Cohen, given all of zero lines in a real shrug of a cameo.  Though ironically, with the cultural moment Jeopardy has been having lately, he's arguably the most relevant face in the entire ad.

Runner-up: Uber Eats' ad was a near-miss in a lot of categories, so I'll mention it here.  Jennifer Coolidge (aka "Stifler's Mom"), Gwyneth Paltrow, Trevor Noah, Succession's Nicholas Braun... that's a lot of moderate star power to stuff into an ad that is so conceptually misbegotten it needs to have "don't do this" in the fine print under basically every scene.

The Bad Idea Jeans Award for Most Epic Miscalculation

Would you believe Facebook - I'm sorry, "Meta, it's Meta, please don't call us Facebook, Facebook is merely one of our services" - made a ridiculous ad that made one of its awful products look shitty?

 

SalesForce has been running ads during the Olympics (one of which ran during the Super Bowl too, but it wasn't made for the game) which mock the idea of the "metaverse," but quite frankly no mockery of that sort can do as much to attack the concept as this ad itself, which spends most of its runtime implying that potential users of its product are old, tired garbage.  When we finally see the metaverse itself - for about ten seconds - it looks, you guessed it, like absolute dogshit.  Hey, what if you could have a Zoom call but it was in the Wii Sports lobby?  That's what this fucking shit looks like.  Obviously at some point they were going to have to actually show us the "metaverse" but if that's what it is... I'm just unclear on who this is supposed to appeal to.  You can already have multi-person get-togethers online where you can see everyone, and frankly if I'm trying to hang out with "old friends" maybe I'd rather see my actual friends than some dumbass cartoon avatars.  We are clearly a long, long way from the world of Ready Player One.  That's not a bad thing, of course.

SkyMall Championship Trophy

As always, this award goes to the weirdest attempt to sell a product.  We've already seen several good contenders, so I think we have to go with Irish Spring:

 

I really thought we were done with ads that look like this - it has basically the exact visual palette and overall aesthetic of an Old Spice ad from 2005.  But more to the point, I will never really understand why you would want to make the people representing your product so weird and creepy.  That's right: use Irish Spring because a creepy talking rabbit told you to!  And when you have, you can be a weirdo cult member too!  No, I mean, it doesn't get any more appealing than that, right?  Truly bizarre.  I just wanted some soap, not nightmares for weeks.

Runner-up: Aside from various ads already mentioned, I'll toss in a reference to the Caesar's Sportsbook ad, which so briefly mentions the actual product that I just totally missed what it was for.  The ad actually has a couple decent jokes, including an off-the-top-rope bodyslam on poor Cooper Manning, but I'm ultimately very confused about how "the Mannings have a dinner party with 'Caesar' and 'Cleopatra'" has anything to do with sports gambling.  Also, fuck all these ads for sports gambling.

Worst Super Bowl Ad of 2022

With everything I've said so far, you'd think this was a hard decision.  It wasn't.

 

Fuuuuuck THIS.

This is a $14 million ad and it literally just has one joke that it repeats over and over.  That joke, by the way, is "cryptocurrency is exactly the same as some of the most critical inventions of human history and you're an idiot if you don't think so."

This ad compares crypto to the following things, in order:

*the wheel

*the fork

*indoor plumbing

*American democracy

*the light bulb

*the moon landing

*the Walkman

That's right, cryptocurrency.  Exactly as relevant and necessary to human history as THE WHEEL and INDOOR PLUMBING.  Even if cryptocurrency were a hundred times less shitty than it actually is, this would be a level 10 Get the Fuck Over Yourselves alert.  A lot of people have said similar things already, but crypto companies will be lucky if we're not looking back at this in five years as comparable to the dot-com bubble of the late 90s.

Runner-up: Just for good measure, there was another crypto commercial that was somehow almost exactly as bad!

 

If this one isn't quite as bad as the FTX one, it's only because it's not wasting my time for an entire minute.  Everything you need to know about crypto is summed up not in this ad, but by this ad, which features actual-money-billionaire LeBron James not just shilling for crypto but allowing it to coopt his life story and create a ghoulish simulacrum of his teenage self just for good measure.  Why?  Why would someone so rich do an ad like this?  The answer, surely, has to be that he has a bunch of money in crypto.  In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that 27% of all Bitcoin was controlled by the top 0.01% of investors.  The whole thing is yet another playground for the rich... except, unlike with real money, regular people are not inherently bought in to crypto, which means there's a real risk of the market totally cratering if there's little to no call for crypto to be used in real financial life.  The rich people who have already bought truckloads of crypto need you to buy in for their investment to pay off.  That's why these ads are airing.  Not because this is some great product.  Not because it's going to change your life more than not having to shit in a hole in the ground did for your 5th-great-grandfather. Certainly not because it's going to make you, an average joe who can probably afford a very small buy-in at most, a "fortune." (The idea that this might even be possible would be the last nail in the coffin of the idea that crypto is actually a currency of any kind, if that were something that anyone actually still believed.)  The rich can't adequately exploit you the way they do in the real economy unless you willingly buy in.  Don't.