Super Bored Awards 2024

I've said this before, but back in the days when the Super Bowl was often a pretty lousy game, "I just watch for the ads" became a common joke. However, we've now gone from a time in the 80s and 90s when you had maybe only one or two really good games in a decade to a time when you really only have one or two BAD games in a decade. (To wit: between the 1983 and 1994 seasons, only two games were decided by less than two touchdowns. Between the 2010 season and this year, only three games were decided by more than 11 points, and at least as many - including this year's dramatic overtime finish - were fully in the balance right at the end of the fourth quarter.)

The 2024 Super Bowl started slow, but ultimately it was an incredibly exciting game in the fourth quarter and overtime, which is all I really demand of a football game. The ads, meanwhile, seem to get more boring every year. It's almost straight boilerplate now - grab a famous person, stick them in an office or in front of a green screen, have them make a few semi-jokes that are not in any way actually funny, and you're good to go. For as much as these ad slots cost, you'd think companies would want to put in a little more effort, but it seems like it's the exact opposite. If we're spending ten million dollars or whatever, there's no point in taking a risk on a clever idea. Just get someone recognizable so people will think, "Ah yes! I want a Michelob Ultra, as it is a beer beloved by Lionel Messi, Jason Sudeikis, and Dan Marino!"

With that said, let's hand out some awards.

The Apple 1984 Memorial Award for Least Shitty Ad

If you can do basic math, you will note that this is the 40th anniversary of the famous Apple ad and while it remains indelible, I think you'd have to acknowledge both that Apple's ascension to ubiquitous tech hegemon makes it at least mildly ironic in hindsight and that the extent to which it was the birth of the "big game ad" craze has turned out to be pretty annoying. Perhaps surprisingly, Apple itself did not appear least night. Neither did many even half-decent ads, making handing out this award something of a challenge. Ultimately, I think I liked this United ad the most:

"This is really an ad for something else" rug pulls can be annoying, but considering how seriously the NFL takes itself, it was amusing to see what looked like yet another up-its-own-ass NFL ad about the glory of fandom or whatever, only for the reveal to come that it was actually an ad about how United doesn't have change fees. Not the most original concept, but at least it wasn't hideously overdone.

Runner-Up: I ultimately couldn't pick the Dunkin' Donuts ad because building ads around celebrities is getting so tiresome, but it was easily the most effective of the "famous people trying to take the piss out of themselves" group. The BMW ad with the Christopher Walken impressions was kind of a funny idea, but it couldn't land the plane.

The Actual 1984 Award for Most Dystopian Ad

Congrats to UKG, a company I had never heard of before last night. Within seconds of their ad starting, I was already thinking of this award:

To be fair, it would have been way worse if this had been an ad specifically for Amazon or Walmart or something, which is what I was thinking when it first started. The version of the spot that actually appeared on the broadcast was only 30 seconds as I recall, but this ad is a failure at any length. For one thing, even after watching it I can't really tell you what UKG is or does. Something with timekeeping at work I guess. But also, the societal push to view work as a place where you have "the time of your life?" Oh yes, I owe it all to you, menial warehouse job! Fuck right off with that shit. To say nothing of how dystopian it is that you can have a corporation making enough money to advertise on the Super Bowl with the business model of "we make sure your employees adhere to a draconian punch-clock at all times."

Runner-Up: Microsoft, but we'll get to it.

Most Overproduced Ad

Frankly we might need to change this to Least Overproduced Ad just so there wouldn't be as many contenders to sift through every year. But there was a clear winner here: Bud Light.

If it were just this ad, with its inane concept and frenetic "just throw everything you can think of onscreen" execution, that would be bad enough. But what locked up the award here is the coordination with the actual broadcast - if you were watching the game, you saw that the end of this ad was followed by a return to the stadium, where the camera zoomed in on a suite featuring the characters from the ad. Jim Nantz even had to point them out. When you're so ingrained in the corporate bullshit of the NFL that you can coordinate a transition from your ad directly to the actual game, that is some serious overproduction. It's also just incredibly exhausting.

Runner-Up: I wrote down this Mountain Dew ad as soon as I saw it:

This actually has almost the exact same concept as the Mr. T Skechers ad, but at least "T is always in Skechers!" almost works as a joke. "I'm having a blast" is basically anti-comedy, and while the ad seems to be implicitly acknowledging that by casting the ultra-deadpan Aubrey Plaza, that doesn't make it funnier. The reason this falls under the Most Overproduced category instead of something like Worst Use of "Humor" is that they bothered to do so many different setups in service of a single joke that isn't even really a joke. Extra negative points for how bad the dragon part looks.

Cheapest Budget/Clumsiest Execution Award

I barely know what Temu is, but apparently it's some website that sells incredibly cheap crap:

I know animation isn't necessarily cheap, but this LOOKS cheap, and anyway the ad cannot possibly have cost much given how many times it ran during the game. Also I guess I know what they mean by "shop like a billionaire" but that's frankly just embarrassing given what has got to be the extremely low quality of anything you're buying for those kinds of prices.

Runner-Up: There were a few pretty cheap-looking ads but I guess I'll go with Snapchat here. This is actually a much more effective ad message-wise than the 30-second version that ran during the game (which I could only find on YouTube in the ever-unpopular someone-filming-their-TV format), so I'm more forgiving of its general aesthetic at this length, but the version that aired definitely deserves a mention for likely being pretty confusing to anyone who isn't already using Snapchat anyway.

Worst Use of "Humor" Award

In the Simpsons episode "Radioactive Man," there's an amusing gag where Rainier Wolfcastle - the show's Arnold Schwarzenegger stand-in - has difficulty parsing the character's punny catchphrase "Up and atom!" due to his stiltedly formal ESL status. Instead, he keeps saying "Up and at them!" despite the instructions of a frustrated dialect coach. This bit runs about ten seconds:

Now consider (a) the length of this State Farm ad and (b) that episode aired on September 24, 1995.

It's bad enough that this is the same joke - and once again, this is barely a joke - over and over for a solid minute. It also doesn't even really make sense. It's not like there's any confusion about what word Arnold is saying just because his accent doesn't hit the trailing R. So now it's just "tee-hee, foreign guy talk funny," which puts this ad squarely in the "Bood Light" camp of late 2000s xenophobia. I get that Arnold willingly participated, and if an A-list celebrity decides he wants to be in on the joke about his accent then fine, but that doesn't make it any funnier.

Runner-Up: Basically every other ad on the entire game could be tied for second here, but I'll do a special citation for the Drumstick ad because it's not 2008 and this would be stupid even if it were.

Flimsiest Pretense Award

I've noted in both of the last two years that this one has been getting increasingly difficult to hand out because "check out this hot babe" just isn't a hallmark of ads anymore. So I think we're going to have to discontinue it. As a replacement, since the downfall of "check out this hot babe" is a good trend, let's go with a bad trend:

The 84 Lumber Memorial Award for Most Political Bullshit

Remember in 2017 when 84 Lumber ran an ad that first seemed to be anti-border wall, and then turned out maybe to be pro-wall, and either way had fuck all to do with lumber? That's the namesake for this award, inspired by the problematic proliferation of religious and/or political ads during this game. (If you're thinking, "Hey, religion isn't political!" that's adorably naive.)

There's only one possible winner for this one: it's the RFK Jr. campaign ad, which I'm not going to embed or even link to here because fuck that guy. This would have been a terrible ad even if Kennedy himself weren't one of the worst assholes out there, but using an old 1960 John F. Kennedy jingle and trying to position yourself as the scion of the dynasty is especially dumb when virtually everyone else in the family has distanced themselves from his anti-vax bullshit. (Kennedy himself rather hilariously had to apologize to his family for this ad, which he claimed not to have any responsibility for, but you'll have to forgive me if I don't believe that a PAC endorsing Kennedy didn't even run the idea of a Super Bowl ad by his people in advance. Given that he has it pinned to his Twitter profile, I suspect he doesn't really feel that bad about it.)

If you didn't see it, the ad notably doesn't mention a single policy position or really anything at all beyond "Hey, someone named Kennedy seems to be running," and to be honest I'm not sure how old you would have to be for that to seem even remotely like an enticing proposition just on its face. 65 minimum? With the ludicrous conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would endorse Joe Biden from the championship podium after the game predictably failing to materialize, this was the only direct mention of presidential candidates during the game and I, for one, could very much have done without it.

Runner-Up: I just don't need Mark Wahlberg out there trying to push a Catholic prayer app and I really don't need him doing it with the corny-ass youth pastor line, "Stay prayed up." Stick to making Netflix movies no one is going to watch.

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

Once again this could go to nearly every ad, although there were even more candidates for the next award on the list than usual. At any rate, it's hard to look past CeraVe for this one:

I actually kind of enjoy this ad, which is executed amusingly. But the concept - hey, let's cash in on this actor's name being in our product name by having him pretend like he's trying to cash in on the fact that his name is in our product name - is just too much of a lock. It's especially egregious because when have you seen a CeraVe ad during a football game? This may have been aimed at the "watching for Taylor Swift" crowd but either way it feels like the only reason CeraVe even has a Super Bowl ad is that they thought of a justification for getting someone moderately famous to appear in it. At least things like Bud Light and Doritos would be running ads regardless.

Runner-Up: The Doritos ad with Jenna Ortega isn't incredibly terrible but just... why did it need to be Jenna Ortega when she barely even has anything to do? That's pretty much the definition of egregious.

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

As I noted above, there were an awful lot of A-listers this year: Ben, Matt, and J-Lo; Arnold; Bradley Cooper; Christopher Walken; Beyonce. But when you really want to talk egregious, you need to enter the realm of the pointless cameo. And that gives us Scarlett Johansson:

There is simply no reason for ScarJo to be in this ad, especially as a still relatively young actress with exactly two Oscar nominations under her belt. She is miles away from being analogous to someone like Dan Marino or Bruce Smith, all-time great athletes whose careers were hampered by the lack of a championship. Was Charles Barkley not available? Was that too obvious? This is pure "we could get her and she's famous," nothing more. It's not like the jokes with her are even funny, although they're not any worse than the ad's bizarrely stupid concept in the first place.

Runner-Up: The Booking.com ad with Tina Fey might have skated except for the decision to toss Glenn Close in there for no apparent reason. (Is it some 30 Rock reference I don't get? Who cares?) Extra demerits for having Fey exclaim "Glenn Close??" This was an obnoxious trend this year - putting famous people in your ad and then not trusting the audience to know who they are. If I've said it once I've said it a hundred times: if the person is famous enough to be a key part of your ad, you shouldn't have to announce them. It's a hat on a hat, except that that term is usually used in relation to jokes and none of these things are actual jokes. (Also: if Glenn Close was willing to do a Super Bowl ad, shouldn't she have been in the ScarJo part? She actually is famous for having a very long career and repeatedly failing to win an Oscar! Maybe she wouldn't have wanted to do that, I guess, but it would have made so much more sense.)

The Bad Idea Jeans Award for Most Epic Miscalculation

This one doesn't go to a single ad, but rather to CBS itself for accepting an ad from the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism and then also letting Kanye West run an ad for himself (which I'm not linking). Nothing says "we are definitely taking antisemitism seriously as a concept and not just using it as a cudgel to suppress criticism of Israel's military actions in Gaza" like simultaneously giving a platform to one of America's most famous antisemites.

Runner-Up: Duolingo's ad was weird and needlessly gross, and it also caused most of their app to crash into a "maintenance break" within a minute of airing.

The SkyMall Championship Trophy for Weirdest Attempt to Sell a Product

Gotta go with CrowdStrike here because when you are a company that most of the audience has never heard of, you should probably do an ad that makes it very clear what it is that you do.

Or, you could do that. I guess I have a basic sense of what CrowdStrike does - they stop breaches! - but hearing a little more about their services might have been a more effective ad for their product than seeing some shitty CGI robot thing get poofed into its cartoon boxer shorts.

Runner-Up: The Nerds Gummy Clusters ad is just kind of gross. And what is the overlap between the market for a children's candy product, or people who recognize TikTok influencer Addison Rae on sight (as you had better believe I did not), and people who recognize a Flashdance reference anyway?

Worst Super Bowl Ad of 2024

The issue with the ad for Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant or whatever the fuck exactly, isn't that the ad itself is actually a total train wreck. It's the pitch. We spend forever going through "people say I can't do X, I'll never do Y." Gosh, what could this product be that is going to facilitate this triumph of the human spirit we're building towards?

Oh, it's some AI bullshit that is going to do all the work for me, based on work that someone else already did. Someone said I don't have the talent to make art? I'll show them - by typing a prompt into a system that scrapes and reconfigures the work of actual artists! That definitely makes me a real artist myself and not just a talentless hack and AI-assisted plagiarist!

The 2022 Super Bowl was bombarded with ads for cryptocurrency, right at what turned out to be the peak of the crypto bubble. Two years later, NFTs are all but forgotten, one of the companies that advertised on that game collapsed and saw its founder go to jail, and crypto is largely back to being the niche interest it was before a few bigwigs thought they could ride it to infinite wealth. I'm holding out hope that the AI push during this year's game represents a similar crest of the wave - most uses of AI as they've been demonstrated to date are things that almost nobody wants or needs, and yet they're being pushed on us anyway. At least Google's ad touted the use of AI as an accessibility tool - also a more niche use, but a legitimate one. Microsoft suggesting its product can help you succeed by just doing all your work for you? First of all, if you know anything about these AI tools you know that they can't be relied on at all - there are the stories of AI-prepared legal briefs featuring made-up cases, the struggle of AI art creators to properly generate text or human fingers, and the fact that these tools are somehow getting WORSE at providing even the most basic information. (I wouldn't trust an AI assistant to properly quiz me on organic chemistry, as shown in the ad, for even a microsecond.) But beyond that, I'm unclear on who the wider market is for a tool like this. Who is the person who proclaims that they're going to change the world by... using a chatbot to write all their video game code for them? Make a shitty-looking animated movie that almost definitely is ripping off someone else's animated movie?

It's been said, but the grotesque irony is that the promise of AI has always been that it could automate jobs that were boring or unsafe for humans - and instead, the second it goes mainstream you have the capitalist class pushing its use as a replacement for legitimate artisans. Art, a distinctly human creation, has been reduced by these losers to a commodity that can and should be churned out mechanically by an automaton that has no soul and no true ideas or talent of its own. All it can do is process the work of actual human artists, synthesize and at best iterate on that, with no serious understanding of what it's producing beyond the binary knowledge that its output basically fits a descriptive prompt it was given. This is a bullshit future and we don't have to live in it. The sooner AI follows crypto down the mainstream garbage chute, the better.

Ram to the Future

This ad isn't that bad, all told, although its key concept is pretty hoary at this point. But I do have a specific issue with it.

Jason Jones: "Are you excited about buying an electric vehicle, but worried that it could leave you... unsatisfied?"

This entire ad is basically a series of jokes about how an electric car running out of batteries is the same as a flaccid penis. Some of them, to be fair, are relatively funny. As I said, this isn't a remotely new concept - scanning the archives on the old blog yields a very similar "banned from the Super Bowl" Bud Light ad in which all the jokes are about farting rather than boners. Or this lame local Comcast ad that compares internet speeds to fucking. Or the Mini ad where trunk space is equated to anal sex. Or the truly terrible Axe ad that throws "balls" around with just the thinnest patina of double entendre.

So yeah. Ram isn't breaking any new ground here. Even the idea of "pretending to be a pharmaceutical ad" is hardly novel. Still, that's not the real problem.

Jones: "Then you could be one of many Americans concerned about... premature electrification."

The second-biggest problem with this ad is that its core concept does not totally make sense. I know what they actually mean, but the obvious play on words is to "premature ejaculation" and yet what's being discussed in the ad doesn't really line up with that; it's more of an erectile dysfunction thing. These are not entirely dissimilar problems, to be sure, but they are hardly identical.

Jones: "Symptoms may include fearing you might not be able to last as long as you'd like..."
Guy #1: "There was plenty of charge before... and... sometimes it goes away."
Woman #1: "A lot of times."
Guy #1: "I've been working a lot."

This first exchange was the one I found the funniest, probably because it had the advantage of coming first. Uh, I mean appearing first in the ad.

Jones: "...being unsure if you have enough power to handle your payload..."

Load, everyone. Am I right?

Guy #2: "I don't know if I got the power for this, baby."
Woman #2: "I'm adventurous, I like to go all the way. I don't want to have to question if we're even gonna make it."
Guy #2: "...yeah."
Woman #2: "It's a concern."

One thing that does tend to bug me about ads that use this trope as a runner is that there is usually a pretty big gap between the effectiveness of the double entendres. For example, "I like to go all the way" is not a very good double entendre in my opinion because that is not an expression that anyone uses unless they are talking about fucking. "I like to go all the way" to the campground? No. No one says that, ever.

Jones: "...lacking the confidence about getting, and being able to keep, a charge..."
Woman #3: "Having to stop every time we got really excited, that wouldn't work for me. Stop, start, stop, start..."

Another thing about this ad... we are well into the electric car boom at this point. I really thought these concerns had largely if not entirely abated. Those Chevy Volt ads where people were confused about how hybrids worked are more than a decade old, and with (for better or worse) the rise of Tesla, it does not seem to me like the average American is still confused by or scared of electric vehicles. Granted, this one is specifically about electric trucks, and so it is trying to address a specific set of people with a specific set of concerns (can this electric truck REALLY handle a camper????). The idea of "premature electrification" is that you rushed into buying an electric car too fast and bought one that couldn't handle your particular outdoor adventure needs or whatever. But that leads me to the final problem here.

Jones: "If PE - premature electrification - is something you're worried about, go to RamREV.com and find out if the Ram 1500 REV, with options being designed to extend range in satisfying ways, is right for you."
[onscreen text: "COMING LATE 2024"]

Late 2024!!!! This was a 2023 Super Bowl ad, remember. Your big pitch, in a time where electric cars are finally gaining substantial traction, is to be like "All electric vehicles are currently trash, but don't worry, Ram trucks will solve this problem in... I dunno, a year and a half? Almost two? Look, we're working on it, okay?"

Meanwhile, Jeep ran this eye-catching ad about hybrid vehicles you can buy right now:

Although this has its own problems that I suppose the Ram spot does go some way to addressing. For starters, if you read the fine print, the charging station shown at the end of the ad is a "concept charging station" (and either way you're probably not finding an effective charging station on top of a mountain anytime soon). In that same fine print, we get this information:

"Wrangler 4xe has an all-electric driving range of 21 miles and Grand Cherokee has an all-electric driving range of 25 miles. Based on EPA estimates with a fully charged battery. Actual mileage may vary."

These are hybrids, so the all-electric range isn't entirely the point, but at an introductory MSRP well over $50,000, it doesn't totally feel like you're getting the added value of a futuristic electric Jeep with a big 20 miles of range (and probably a lot less if you're off-roading). Hooray, my hybrid Jeep made it to the store and back on a single charge! Hmm, why the fuck am I driving a Jeep Wrangler when I live in the suburbs?

The electric truck market is a pretty complex one to navigate - and I mean all the way down to a psychological level. For one thing, there are barely any all-electric trucks yet (though Ram is not alone in promising a 2024-ish delivery of their product, so the market could explode in the near future). I'm sure many of the concerns teased in the Ram ad, like electric vehicles not being able to tow heavy payloads, are legitimately held by many truck owners who might consider going electric. And then of course there's the cultural piece - without trying to dig up stats, I'm sure that the market for pickup trucks is largely dominated by the kind of "real Americans" who like their meat red, their trucks loud, and their women quiet. The segment of this market made up of people offended that electric cars even exist - "rolling coal" has been a problem since the Obama era, and more recently you've had idiots engaging in "ICEing" EV charging stations - will probably never get on board with an all-electric pickup (or even a hybrid). You can pry their black exhaust plumes from their cold, dead hands.

For everyone else, this sort of ad makes some sense, I guess. But it retains a weird "too soon" vibe for me. The product doesn't actually exist yet and, with repeat delays in the Tesla Cybertruck (to be fair, Tesla is a uniquely terrible company in many ways) and other electric trucks being proposed and later canceled outright, it seems a bit risky to advertise for something that may or may not fully deliver on the (admittedly vague) promises being made in this ad. You'd think it would make more sense to run an ad like this once the product is getting ready to roll off the line, but I guess when it's a product that people will own for years, Ram is essentially trying to cockblock other electric automakers and save a retail spot for itself by promising that its electric truck will be the BEST. You know, once it's actually ready to go. Just... just hang on, it's almost... just give me a second. It's chilly in here, okay?

No Roast for the Weary

It's kind of bizarre that the Planters marketing team came up with the idea to kill Mr. Peanut before the idea that they could build an ad around the word "roasted" having a second definition.

Alternately, maybe they just dodged this idea for as long as they could, because it never had any real hope of being funny.

There's an episode of The Office where Michael organizes a roast of himself, thinking it's going to be extremely low-impact if not wholly flattering, and instead his employees take the opportunity to actually roast the shit out of him; the segment ends with Michael choking up and storming off. That's illustrative of the general problem with roasts, or perhaps more specifically with the modern "roast industry" that has emerged over the past couple decades: everyone wants the cachet of "getting roasted," but a roast only truly works when the subject has sufficiently thick skin and a sense of humor about themselves such that nothing is really off-limits. This is why by far the best roasts are those of comedians, who get it. By comparison, remember when Comedy Central decided to do a roast of Donald Trump and he vetoed any jokes about how he wasn't actually that rich? (He didn't have any problem with the jokes about him wanting to fuck his own daughter, which... anyway.) You can't roast someone with veto power over the content - and that's exactly what you get when the "person" being "roasted" is an animated spokescharacter for a billion-dollar corporate brand, in a commercial that brand paid for.

For that matter, how were you ever going to roast a fictional peanut? He doesn't have life history to make fun of, he doesn't really have a personality... in this teaser, the jokes we see are mostly about peanuts in general, plus two jokes about his appearance. Here's the entire, ahem, "set list":

"I'll make this quick, Mr. Peanut, I know you've got some brownies to ruin"

"Mr. Peanut, why are you dressed like it's five recessions ago?"

"Mr. Peanut, what do you eat at parties? People?"

"I'm a big fan, I love your work in Thai food"

"We can all agree: there's rich, and then there's 'haven't worn pants in 100 years' rich"

Don't forget, the roastee is allowed to get in on the act himself!

"Wow, that was brutal. Wish Planters would just kill me off again!"

Well, he's not wrong: that WAS brutal. We might disagree on the exact definition of that word though.

Woof. While his look may be the easiest target, the best roast of Mr. Peanut's design was already done by Cohen Edenfield on Twitter an entire decade ago:

is there anything more capitalist than a peanut with a top hat, cane, and monocle selling you other peanuts to eat

— Cohen is a ghost (@skullmandible) August 29, 2013

Not only is that funnier than either of the jokes about Mr. Peanut's look that we get here, but it actually gets under the skin a bit by making a capitalist critique, whereas the jokes here double (in frankly Trumpian fashion) as sly compliments about the subject's wealth. (Or anyway they would if Mr. Peanut were remotely a real person.)

Maybe there are some better jokes in the full roast, but there's no reason to believe that when this is what they ran with to whet our appetites. I'm not nearly enough of a masochist to sit through over ELEVEN MINUTES of this shit when the teaser is so dire. The single best joke here is Jeff Ross's about ruining brownies, and that's obviously pretty tame. (Side note: since when does Ross look like he got stopped halfway through morphing into Ving Rhames? If he didn't have the same voice as ever I wouldn't even have known it was him.) His other joke, the one about Thai food, isn't even a joke. (To be fair, it was clipped from a longer bit; to be less fair, I did watch enough of Ross's intro to the full roast to see what it was clipped from and it's not any funnier.) Ross is obviously more than capable of being funny at these things so I doubt any of this is really his fault other than accepting the gig at all, but then that's kind of my point; this entire concept was DOA no matter the caliber of comedian you involved.

I certainly don't subscribe to the older and/or right-wing comedian whining that "you can't say anything anymore!" Usually people who say that are griping that they'll get canceled if they keep doing their 1980s set featuring a ten-minute block about how much they hate Asian drivers or something similarly racist. But when it comes to a roast, you do need to be able to say virtually anything about your subject or there's just no point. And when there are corporate reins on your roast, that's never going to be possible.

All this wouldn't matter so much if the ad itself were a true one-off. "Roasting Mr. Peanut" is a passably amusing gag to build a single 30-second spot around, at least in theory, and in that scenario it wouldn't even really matter if the jokes were bad. But this wasn't just a punny gag. They were dead serious about doing this shit for real. In addition to shooting a full roast sequence lasting more than ten minutes and putting that online, they clipped multiple jokes (plus Mr. Peanut's animated laughter in response) and made those their own short videos on the Planters YouTube channel. They thought people were gonna find these jokes hilarious and want to share them with their friends. They thought they could go viral just by wanting it enough! It really is legitimately embarrassing.

Maybe Planters needs a marketing rethink. Between dramatically "killing off" their spokescharacter and now this, they seem to be trying rather desperately to find a gimmick that will attract online engagement. But I don't feel like it's been going very well, and besides, not every product should or needs to try for that. This is roasted nuts, not Mountain Dew or Taco Bell or whatever. Relax a little bit, will you?

Jokeless

When it comes to classic comedies, 1995's Clueless doesn't have the reputation as a laugh riot that something like Caddyshack does. But it is still a comedy. Which means it's still ripe for an ad to ruin.

Cher: "I used to be pretty clueless about shopping."

This might seem cringe-inducing until you remember that the movie itself drops the word "clueless" in the dialogue at least three or four times. So it actually tracks.

Amber: "Among other things."
Cher: "Like when I heard I could save by getting cash back with Rakuten, I was like 'As if!' But then I was like, 'Ugh, why didn't I do this sooner?'"

I recently rewatched this movie and one of the key things you notice when you watch it is that its protagonist is actually pretty annoying. And if you think these lines are annoying coming out of a cute teenager, imagine how annoying they are coming out of a 46-year-old anti-vaxxer.

Cher: "You can get cash back on all the fashion, even your most capable outfits..."

I know "most capable outfit" is a specific reference to the movie because I've seen it in the last month, but that's a fairly deep cut IMO. This movie is nearly 28 years old. What percentage of people are going to get that? Okay I don't care anymore.

Cher: "...at your fave beauty stores - ooh, eye cream! Not that I need it."

"Not that I need it, because I got plastic surgery instead." (I have no idea if Alicia Silverstone actually got plastic surgery. Either way, she looks fine for 46, but 46 isn't even that old and also she definitely looks like she's in her mid-40s. Settle down. Do you think half the pitch for this ad was "We'll let you talk about how young you definitely still look?")

Cher: "And on pretty much whatever! Who put that there? In conclusion, you'd have to be butt-crazy to shop without Rakuten."
[class applauds]
Cher: "Cha-ching!"

"Butt-crazy" is of course a reference to the least weird part of Clueless, when Cher decides she wants to lose her virginity to her stepbrother. (Ironically this is probably the part of the movie that has aged the best, at least in terms of this country's porn preferences. Or so I hear.) It also seems notable that Paul Rudd also appeared in a Super Bowl ad in his capacity as a major Marvel superhero while Silverstone was relegated to playing the nearly three-decade-old hits.

Amber: "Um, hello, do I even get a rebuttal?"
Cher: "I'm sure it'd be... re-brutal."
Amber: "Whatever."

And that is the joke you get when ad writers can't just pull directly from the movie. (I don't remember that line in the movie anyway. If it was, probably the reason I forgot is because it is not funny and sucks.)

[Cher sits down]
Guy behind her: "Aren't you a little old for high school?"
Cher: "What?" *winks at camera*

Oh sorry, we had an even better joke to go out on! "What?" Classic comedy gold right there.

Nostalgia is always serious business - remember the period from about 1990 to 1996 when suddenly half the sitcoms from the 1950s and 1960s got modern updates? I suppose I should be glad that stuff like this is relegated to easily forgotten TV commercials and we're not getting, like, a $100 million Seinfeld movie starring Miles Teller as Jerry. But as someone for whom mid-90s references should be right in the sweet spot, I just find them tiresome. Hearing adult woman Alicia Silverstone rehash a bunch of old bits from her brief period as an it-girl isn't inherently funny and this ad is far too stiff to make them work beyond just "oh yeah, that was a line in that movie" recognition bingo. For the money Rakuten presumably spent hiring Silverstone and recreating her iconic wardrobe, they could potentially have written a real commercial that gets the message across even stronger. I'm sure the marketers have all kinds of data saying that "seeing a thing you've seen before" is a huge sales driver or it wouldn't be such a common tactic, but at the very least it would help if "thing I've seen before" was even a tiny bit funny or enjoyable to watch.

Hacky 'Shack

There really is no movie so funny that a beer ad trying to capitalize on its recognizability can't completely drain it of anything resembling humor.

I say this sort of thing a lot when it comes to ads, but here I go again: I defy you to explain to me how any of this is funny. It is supposed to be funny, surely. You don't ape the aesthetic and directly pull lines from a classic comedy because you are not trying to be funny. But realistically, you probably do it because you don't know how to be funny without just referencing something funny and hoping that's enough. And it very much is not. Maybe some of these lines play funnier in the longer, online-only version of this ad with a little more context. But you knew you were making this to be cut down into 60 seconds. (In any event, I'm hard-pressed to understand what the "jokes" are here other than expecting me to laugh at the repetition of a line I've heard before - with that in mind, these were the best lines they could pull?)

Brian Cox in the Ted Knight part is fairly inspired casting, but otherwise I don't really know why anyone in this ad is in it other than "they were available." This is Serena Williams' second alcohol-promoting appearance of the 2023 Super Bowl and I guess all the talking in the Remy Martin ad gave her laryngitis because she inexplicably has zero lines in this one despite being the ostensible main character. Either way I don't know why it's her as opposed to literally anyone else. Why is Tony Romo playing Carl? I guess all the athletes here are also big golfers. Sure, why not. (Michael O'Keefe, Danny Noonan from the original movie, also makes a cameo as the "Be the ball" guy and if you knew that before reading it in a YouTube comment that puts you one ahead of me. To be fair to me, Michael O'Keefe is 67 years old.)

For good measure, the ad closes with the slogan "It's only worth it if you enjoy it" which is so vapid and devoid of meaning it could be appended to almost any commercial. What exactly is "it?" Golf? Michelob Ultra? Life? Deep stuff, man.

If you're curious, here is the full three-minute version which, I must say, adds virtually nothing except for: (a) a second shot of Michael O'Keefe in which he is much easier to recognize, (b) a couple pointless shots of the gopher that I'm amazed did not make it into the TV version, and (c) an unconnected coda with Tony Romo doing the Bill Murray "it's a Cinderella story" bit. I don't know who told Tony Romo that his Carl Spackler impression is hysterically funny but they need to be shot. (Also, astoundingly, Serena Williams still does not get even a single word of dialogue in the full version. And no, none of the lines are funnier with small bits of additional context. If anything it feels like they were being needlessly padded out to get to three minutes! Which doesn't even make sense!)

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.