As millions of viewers join the big game year after year, we love FiveThirtyEight LOVE Super Bowl commercials. We actually love them so much that we wanted to know everything about them … by of course analyzing and categorizing them. We looked at the defining characteristics of a Super Bowl ad, and grouped ads based on the criteria they shared – and let me tell you, we found some weird bunches of ads.
According to superbowl-ads.com, we saw 233 ads from the ten brands that aired the most spots in all 21 Super Bowls.1class = “footnote”> While we were reviewing, we evaluated ads based on seven specific criteria, marking each place as a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to each:
Is the ad funny, stupid, weird or silly? Funny ads (or ads that try to be funny) are a resounding “yes” here. Anything serious or dramatic is a ‘no’.
Can you tell what is being advertised within the first ten seconds of the ad? If you can see the product or brand name on the screen, count it.
Did the ad have a patriotic appeal, whether clear or subtle, or does it contain American imagery? Any glimpse of an American flag or the words “America” or “United States” counted, as well as references to the military, manufacturing, and farming.
When we saw a celebrity we recognized, we checked this one out.
Have we seen violence, threats of violence, injuries, fighting or guns? Any allusions to the death or hockey injuries are also counted here.
Did an animal – in a real way or generated by a computer – show up at any point in the ad? Even one-frame appearance counted.
We count any subtle or overt suggestions of sex, sexuality, sexual attraction, or nudity.
Seeing which ads fit into one of these categories was interesting enough in itself – as were how many Bud Light ads, especially from the early 2000s, made particularly heinous jokes. But we found some unique, bizarre and even disturbing ads when we looked at ads that appeared in several categories, especially criteria that you would think could not fit into a single ad.
These ads are probably not the first time you think of Super Bowl ads. They did danger, violence or injury, but not as a joke. This group is home to some real tearjerkers2class = “footnote”> and some attempts at inspirational unity.3class = “footnote”>
But an e-commerce ad from 2001 struck me in this category because it was just like that strange out of context. This ad plays like the end of an emotional Westerner – we watch a chimpanzee horse ride through a deserted ghost town with failed businesses. This tension crescendos with a sock puppet factory being violently compared to a wreck ball while a throwaway puppet lands at our protagonist’s feet. The chimpanzee cries over the devastation he has just seen, and the screen fades to black – only the words “wisely invested” are left. E-Trade has made fun of all the dot-coms that went through it during the previous year, including Pets.com. There are some obvious nods to Pets.com’s 2000 Super Bowl ad, in which the sock puppet mascot sings a bad karaoke. version of Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now.”4class = “footnote”> This e-commerce ad was well received at the time, but 20 years later it struck me as very sad.
The 12 ads in this group combined patriotic symbolism with endorsements of celebrities.5class = “footnote”> There was a fairly wide range in how openly political these ads were – from Bob Dylan who cried over images of soldiers reuniting with their families to Carlos Mencia teaching immigrants how to ‘American’ women hitting in an ad that reaches insensitivity levels far beyond uncomfortable.
But the most stupid ad in this group was a 2001 Pepsi ad in which former Republican senator Bob Dole talked about a large bottle of Pepsi as if it were Viagra while walking on a beach, hitting women and flipping a back flip nailed down.6class = “footnote”> This ad was a parody of a 1998 ad campaign Dole did with Viagra and even features a small role played by Eric Stonestreet – now an award-winning actor known for his role as Cameron Tucker in ABC’s “Modern Family.”
This category was for me the most disturbing of the group, especially considering how many ads meet the criteria. There were a wide variety of approaches in how however, advertisers have combined these categories with some more upsetting than others. On the one hand, there are ads that sell sex while an animal happens to be one of the shots – the Bob Dole Pepsi ad shows him walking his dog on the beach, and a Budweiser ad that focuses on stealing some crabs . 7class = “footnote”> a cool beer makes you sneak into frames of women in bikinis. These ads sell sex, and these ads contain animals, but they are not really fundamentally intertwined.
At the other unholy end of the spectrum, however, there are Bud Light ads in which a talking chimpanzee hits a woman and a hawk returns a woman’s bra to the driver after attacking a city block in search of beer. The only thing more disturbing than looking at these bizarre ads is the realization that an entire boardroom has approved these concepts for a likely advertising space for a million. The ads in this group cover the full spectrum, so watch at your own risk.
These three groupings contain dramatic, funny, and bizarre Super Bowl commercials. Explore all 243 Super Bowl ads we’ve reviewed below and filter to find your own ads.