Super Bowl Special

"The Super Bowl. No one misses this game, Jack; not the big one; not if you're an American. You are riveted every minute to this game. People are betting a million bucks a minute you are. Wealthy people selling insurance, beer, car batteries, beer, automobiles, beer, and beer."

— Robert Klein

There is good reason why a thirty-second commercial in the Super Bowl costs millions of dollars: ^note (More specifically, an average of $5 million for a 30-second spot as of 2018. As an historical point of interest, the price for a 30-second spot on Super Bowl I in 1967 was $37,500, equal to almost $280,000 in 2017.) The Super Bowl is always, without question, the most-watched program of the entire calendar year in America. If you're blowing half your annual advertising budget on just getting the spot, the commercial had better be pretty damned good. And many are. This is so well known that many people watch the Super Bowl just for the commercials, creating the advertiser's dream: a three hour block of time where over ninety million people tune in to watch advertisements.

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

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

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

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

Since the advent of YouTube, advertisers have taken to uploading their Super Bowl commercials (along with behind-the-scenes footage etc.) there. This may or may not result in news outlets posting lengthy articles about the leaked commercials, resulting in a sideways case of Trailers Always Spoil. Platypus Comix took some time out of reviewing some 1992 Super Bowl ads to state that this seems to be why people say that the ads get worse and worse every year: "Well, what do you expect when there are no surprises going in at all?" The website Adland has a pretty extensive archive of Super Bowl commercials, dating back to Super Bowl III in 1969.

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

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Memorable Super Bowl Commercials include:

• Once of the earliest is a Xerox commercial in which a monk, Brother Dominic, gets a completely unreasonable order to make hundreds of the ornate document he slaved over by hand, and going to a print shop with a professional Xerox heavy duty photocopier to do it instead. The spot got a remake 40 years later, showing how far Xerox has evolved but still having the same premise with Brother Dominic. See the remake here.
• Apple's "1984" commercial introducing the Mac, aired in... 1984. This is the ad that started the Super Bowl commercial craze. It's also considered to be one of the best commercials of all time, if not the best.
  • Apple attempted to follow up on the commercial in the following year with an ad for the ill-fated Macintosh Office called "Lemmings", depicting a group of blindfolded office workers marching single file off a cliff while whistling "Heigh-Ho". The last person in the line stops short at the edge and takes off his blindfold, not only realizing the near-miss he made, but also seeing another group of whistling office workers in blindfolds. Around this point, a voiceover lets the viewers know that Apple will announce the Office on January 23rd, adding, "You can look into it, or you can go on with business as usual." Apple spent weeks hyping up the ad, only for it to miss the mark, with people misinterpreting the commercial's metaphor as an unflattering portrayal of potential customers.
  • And then Motorola did a Take That! to Apple and their 1984 ad with their 2011 ad for the Xoom, a tablet competing with the iPad.
• Pick a Budweiser ad campaign, and it's quite likely that it got its start at the Super Bowl. The frogs, the lizards, the Clydesdales, The Bud Bowl, the "Wazzuuuuuuup" guys, the "Here We Go" Phrase Catchers...all Super Bowl commercials.
  • Notably, Anheuser-Busch traditionally buys the first ad spot after kickoff, the most valuable one there is, and places a Budweiser spot in that position.
• In 1996, a little summer film called Independence Day released a trailer for Super Bowl XXX, in which a flying saucer blows up the White House. The following year, Summer Blockbusters would start releasing trailers during the Super Bowl.
• Pepsi's ads have also been quite memorable. The line of commercials with Hallie Kate Eisenberg started there, as did the Britney Spears line.
  • Diet Pepsi's may have been even more memorable, including several ads featuring Cindy Crawford, and one ad spoofing that series (with Cindy Crawford herself checking out a Diet Pepsi-drinking guy...and later, so did one of the Queer Eye guys).
  • One 1997 Super Bowl commercial for Pepsi had a group of grizzly bears... dancing and miming to a version of "YMCA" by the Village People.
• Coca-Cola has had many impressive ads, too, including this spot, featuring Pittsburgh Steelers tackle "Mean Joe" Greene, which aired during Super Bowl XIV in 1980 and is often considered the best SB commercial of all time.^note Although that one technically debuted several months before the Super Bowl, during the 1979 baseball playoffs.
  • In 2009, Coke Zero spoofed the Mean Joe ad with Troy Polamalu.
  • The "Happiness Factory" ads started out as a 2006 Germany FIFA World Cup Special.
    • The "Los Cocacoleros" ad, featuring a parody of "We Didn't Start The Fire" by Billy Joel, was also a FIFA World Cup Special.
  • In 2014, their ad had an unforeseen reaction, where it was America the Beautiful sung in multiple languages. However backlash followed proclaiming an American, patriotic song should be sung in English only (never mind that most of them were speaking broken English, among other things).
    • Made doubly funny when some of those criticizing the ad incorrectly referred to the song as the National Anthem.
• AT&T released a commercial in 1998 – starring a 14-year-old Kate Mara – about a middle-school girl who reveals her secret crush to her friends, only for those friends to quickly blab... and for the '90s telecommunication tech – from beepers to cell phones – to share that secret to the whole world. By the time the girl gets home, even her mother is grinning about "Bobby Templeton," much to the girl's horror. Only for the girl to walk into the living room to see Bobby waiting there to invite her to the big dance.^note Mara mentioned a young Kat Dennings is in the commercial but hasn't been confirmed.
• GoDaddy.com has made a name for itself making blatantly suggestive ads. In fact, they get so caught up in trying to be risqué that the product tends to be overlooked - they're in the extremely sexy... domain-name registrar business.
  • In 2008 they pulled the stunt of posting a Too Hot for TV ad online and hyping that with the actual TV spots. But it's worth noting that most of the steaminess was actually broadcast; the web version is just longer.
  • Tell me how these commercials relate to Go Daddy.
  • The year after the infamous Wardrobe Malfunction, they actually referenced the incident in their ad.
• Terry Tate, Office Linebacker.
  • ::CRASH:: GET OFF TVTROPES AND GET BACK TO WORK, BITCH! WOO WOO!
  • This commercial was so popular that Terry Tate essentially became a playable character in Gears of War.
  • The Terry Tate commercials manage to include an awful lot of bawdy humor, including Terry's repeated Curses Cut Short and his boss being named Mr. Felcher.
• One Nissan commercial had a squadron of pigeons chasing it down, trying to poop on it, chasing it through, among other things, a sidewalk cafe and a wedding, all with Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone" from the Top Gun soundtrack blaring.
  • They also did the ad where G.I. Joe picks up Barbie (to Ken's dismay) to the Van Halen version of "You Really Got Me".
• One Doritos commercial consisted of a guy using a Dorito chip as bait in a mousetrap, and sitting in front of it. He takes a bite from a handful of Doritos, and a giant mouse blasts through the wall and tackles the guy sitting, and proceeds to punch him in the face.
  • Don't forget the Doritos ad from Super Bowl XLIII. The one where the boss gets hit in the groin by a snow globe at the end.
  • The Doritos-Samurai-Ninja, with Doritos shuriken and Flail.
  • Never, ever, tease a pug with Doritos.
    • Never, ever, tease a granny and a baby in a sling-jumper with Doritos.
    • Heck, Never, ever tease your baby in utero with Doritos! (This one actually got backlash from both pro-and anti-abortion groups.)
• Tabasco ran their "Mosquito" ad for SB XXXII. It depicts a guy eating a slice of pizza with their hot sauce added to it, who gets bitten by a mosquito. After dining, the insect flies off a few feet and promptly explodes into a fireball.
• In 2008, FedEx ran an ad in which someone at a business firm proposed using carrier pigeons for shipping. For large items, they already had giant carrier pigeons. Mayhem ensued.
• In 2005, FedEx tried to make the best Super Bowl ad by combining elements of other successful ads:
  1. Celebrity (Burt Reynolds)
  2. Animal (a bear)
  3. Dancing animal (the bear starts to dance with Burt)
  4. Cute kid ("That bear can dance!")
  5. Groin kick (Self-Explanatory)
  6. Talking Animal ("Sorry, Mr. Reynolds.")
  7. Attractive females ("Hey, that bear can talk!")
  8. Product message (optional) (Burt delivers the tagline)
  9. Famous pop song ("Don't Stop Believing")
  10. Bonus ending (Bear: "I loved you in Smokey and the Bandit.")
• In 2000, eTrade showed two guys and a monkey in a garage, with a boom box playing "La Cucaracha". That's pretty much it. The tag line: "Well, we just wasted two million bucks. What are you doing with your money?"
• In 2008, Mexico had a salty crackers ad where a Chinese boy in a Mexican family wonders if he's adopted, only to have his question shrugged off by the family talking about the crackers. The 2008 Beijing Olympics Special was the same commercial, but reversed: a Mexican boy in a Chinese family was wondering if he's adopted. For even more bonus points, the entire commercial was spoken in unsubtitled Chinese, and yet it was perfectly understandable.
• For Super Bowl XLIII, PETA wanted to run an ad that would encourage people to go vegan. It has been denied airtime by the Super Bowl ad committee, cited as being too sexy. Look for yourself.
  • That's exactly their plan; they win either way. Note that a gory guiltfest follows it unless you navigate away.
• Snickers got in trouble with gay rights groups for the 2007 Super Bowl ad where two male mechanics share a Spaghetti Kiss over a Snickers bar, then try to de-gay themselves by "doing something manly". The ad had alternate endings available online; the one that aired showed them ripping out their chest hair, while one online version had them violently attack each other.
• In 2009, Cash4Gold.com, previously known for its late-night basic cable ads that look like they were shot on VHS in 1986, ran a Super Bowl ad starring Ed McMahon and MC Hammer. A lot of Black Comedy on the state of the economy resulted, as America at the time was weathering the worst market crash since The Great Depression and the auto manufacturers, historic standbys of Super Bowl advertising, skipped the Big Game that year because they'd just received government bailouts to avoid collapsing entirely. Seeing Cash4Gold advertise at the Super Bowl as a sign that even the big corporations were hurting summed up the state of the economy perfectly, especially given that they were later exposed as little more than a gold-stealing scam, meaning that they used the Super Bowl to put one over on all of America at once. James Poniewozik, TV critic for TIME, joked that "another year like the last one, and next Super Bowl will feature ads from Cash4YourOrgans.com."
• In 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble, advertising for Super Bowl XXXIV was almost totally consumed by random websites selling useless services, many of which folded shortly afterward (likely because they blew a year's budget on a Super Bowl ad and people still didn't know what they sold). The most famous of these, by far, was the Pets.com sock puppet, which has been spoofed ruthlessly in years since.
  • In a weird move, that exact puppet has been selling Bar None insurance for more than half a decade, arguably longer than it actually existed as the spokespuppet for Pets.com.
  • Referenced in this E*Trade commercial from 2001 (excuse the quality), where the monkey from the previous year rides on horseback through Desolation Shots of failed fictional dot-com bubble businesses, concluding with a sockpuppet (resembling the aforementioned Pets.com puppet) from a demolishing-in-progress "eSocks.com" building thrown at the monkey's feet. Cue crying monkey.
• For 2010, HomeAway.com showed a trailer for a mini-movie followup on the Vacation series called Hotel Hell Vacation, with Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo reprising their respective roles of Clark and Ellen Griswold. The film can be viewed here.
• BoostMobile, for XLIV, reunites the living members of the Chicago Bears Shufflin' Crew^note Walter Payton had died in 1999 for a 25th anniversary followup of their Super Bowl Shuffle, called the Boost Mobile Shuffle. Of course, to save airtime, they aired a 30-second preview of the song, which concludes with the Crew saying, "Go online to find the rest of our jam."
• The 2010 KISS Dr. Pepper ad, co-staring Little Kiss, a KISS tribute band authorized by KISS, made up of midgets.
• Also in 2010, the Google ad "Parisian Love", which documents the life of a couple from first meeting to first child, all through Google searches.
• Electronic Data Systems' 'Cat herders' commercial from 2000, and its followup from 2001, which featured skydiving aerospace mechanics building an airplane — while it was in flight. Both commercials led to a few cases of What Were They Selling Again?, due to EDS being a fairly obscure (and now non-existent; they were bought out and absorbed by HP in 2008-2009) computer services company; the idea was that "if we can herd cats and build airplanes in the air, imagine what we can do for your computing problems".
• Master Lock's long-running but little-changed ^note usually only the voiceover was changed over the years "Shot Lock" ads, in which a sniper fires a round into the lock, but the lock shrugs it off and fails to open. Later additional ads had footage of several people trying (and failing) to shoot the lock open, and another one had people trying to open the locks in different ways. They even tried a one-second version of the original ad one time.
• Believe it or not, there was an ad for Clerks: The Animated Series in the Super Bowl of 2000. It was moderately funny. The ad is available on the DVD, or you can watch it here.
• This Nuveen Investments' commercial in 2000, set 20 Minutes into the Future. Mankind has made significant progress, having cured AIDS and cancer, and is currently having an award ceremony for the breakthroughs in fixing spinal cord injuries. One of the guests presenting the award? None other than Christopher Reeve, up and about again.
  • This ad also created a bit of a stir, and is often cited as either one of the best Super Bowl ads ever, or one of the worst. The Reveal of a walking Christopher Reeve was rather surprising, and some people (who apparently missed the parts about AIDS and cancer being cured) thought it was real. They were disheartened to realize that Reeve was still in his wheelchair, and felt that Nuveen was giving people false hope.
• FIFA example: Possibly the most elaborate commercial ever made, "Write the Future" is a Nike ad which follows several famous players and shows how one errant pass or spectacular save can change the man's whole life. Unfortunately, Every single player featured in that commercial would either be dropped from their national team or eliminated in the Round of 16. Except for the three Spanish players (Cesc Fàbregas, Andrés Iniesta and Gerard Piqué), who won the World Cup.
  • One interesting and often overlooked fact about this commercial is Nike wasn't an official sponsor of FIFA World Cup (Adidas was), so they weren't allowed to mention the World Cup, yet just by airing it during World Cup, as well as cleverly communicating the high stakes of every decision made by a highlighted person (whole nation is celebrating with fireworks / whole nation in ruins) you couldn't think of anything else but the World Cup.
  • Nike would do this ad campaign in the States as well, with one imagine spot being "what if Michael Jordan had missed The Shot?"
• In 2010, Dockers premiered an ad which opened with a bunch of guys marching heroically through a field, clad only in shirts and underwear, proudly singing a song by California folk band The Poxy Boggards, called "I Wear No Pants." The ad cut to a shot of a model wearing Dockers' khakis and a voice intoning, "Calling all men — it's time to wear the pants."
• The 2010 Super Bowl commercial for Kia cars was cute (a gang of giant, living toys goes on a fun road trip to Las Vegas), but it almost got the company in serious trouble because of an NFL rule that bans showing gambling and casinos during the broadcast.
• The Super Bowl's current proximity to Valentine's Day actually has worked in the favor of online floral clearinghouse Teleflora, who in 2009 and 2010 made commercials with "bad box" flowers berating the recipient with how much of a cheapskate the flower-buyer was. The 2010 commercial featured Don Rickles as the voice of the bad flowers.
  • Teleflora also got in hot water when one of the ads had the rude flowers telling its recipient, "No one wants to see you naked!"
• "Miller High Life!" Yup, an ad that ran less than 3 seconds, and just had the main character of the ad campaign (a black delivery guy in a khaki uniform, who in other ads of the campaign delivered Miller High Life to stores) state the name of the product. This piggy-backed off an earlier ad during the NFL playoffs in which the character was confused on why companies needed 30 seconds to pitch their products.
• The Super Bowl XLV commercial for the Chrysler 200 was seen as a positive moment for Detroit, Eminem, and Chrysler.
• Super Bowl XLV also had the Volkswagen Passat ad where a kid dressed as Darth Vader tries using "The Force" on everything and failing until his dad helps him with Forcing the car to start. It is immediately obvious what they are selling, and what feature you'll remember.
  • This got referenced the next year as a Stinger to another Volkswagen ad, which involves a dog losing weight so he could go through a pet door and run alongside the advertised car. The commercial ends and we see that it was being watched in the Mos Eisley cantina, where one of the patrons says he liked it better than the Vader commercial. Cue the real Vader showing up and force-choking him.
• Garmin's Super Bowl XLI commercial is a Shout-Out to Ultraman.
• Super Bowl XXIII had an unsuccessful attempt for Diet Coke in which they had heavily publicized an ad airing before that game's halftime show that was to be the first spot produced in 3-D (this being January 1989). The ad and subsequent "Bebop Bamboozled" show flopped miserably (Here is the ad itself; bookended by NBC Sports' icon Bob Costas making snarky comments.)
  • A more successful commercial was produced for American Express; which teamed Saturday Night Live stars Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey traveling to Miami for the game only for Lovitz (apparently stuck with Visa) having to rely on Carvey to pay his way because his card wasn't accepted, ultimately winning the inaugural USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter.
• Diet Coke fumbled again during Super Bowl XXV in 1991. They pulled their original commercial in order to run a rolling text informing viewers they didn't think it was appropriate because the Gulf War had just began. Everyone naturally called Coca-Cola out, with one critic specifically for being "cheap, phony, patronizing and holier-than-thou". Diet Pepsi, on the other hand, ran their famous Ray Charles and Uh-Huh Girls spot, and ended up winning people's favor in post-match discussions.
• For Super Bowl XLVI...
  • Chevrolet ran an ad taking place After the End of 2012, with a Chevrolet truck emerging from the debris, driving through the Scenery Gorn, and regrouping with other survivors, all set to Barry Manilow's "Looks Like We Made It". The ad also featured a huge Take That! at Ford, where one of their buddies didn't make it.
  • XLVI also saw the TV debut of Ms. Brown, M&M's then latest mascot. Specifically, the commercial involves the Red M&M seeing Ms. Brown at a party, believing it's that kind of party, stripping down, and dancing the "Gangnam Style" dance to "Sexy and I Know it". Really. Keep in mind this was before "Gangnam Style" was even released, giving the commercial a new layer of depth when you go back & watch it again.
  • Coca-Cola introduced a unique ad featuring its polar bears (one representing each team in the Super Bowl) reacting to the current game action, including a website where visitors could take a peek at the bears' real-time reactions to the game at hand.
  • Kia premiered a commercial for the Optima, wherein a man gets accidentally buried in dream dust and winds up fantasizing about Mötley Crüe playing a concert while he races his car around a track in front of a crowd of bikini babes. Then it subverts the traditional Sex Sells setup by having the man bust into his wife's dream and take her away from the Mr. Fanservice she was with. Commentators praised it for being one of the only commercials to show a man wanting to spend time with his wife. Then Kia chopped the last part off when they put it into normal rotation, cutting out the Subversion.
  • Honda gave us a commercial Homage to Ferris Bueller's Day Off... complete with Matthew Broderick as the star.
• Pepsi and Lucas Arts had a hilarious joint commercial to honor the remastered Star Wars movies coming to theaters that year involving an usher calling out Darth Vader for harassing a kid in the theater (By force crushing the Pepsi cup the kid was noisily drinking), drawing his flashlight, and fighting the Sith Lord in a lightsaber duel.
• Snickers started their current "You're Not You When You're Hungry" ad campaign by having Betty White get obliterated during a backyard football game.
• In 1994, Alamo Rent-a-Car had a 1:30 commercial (the longest single ad of that year) where a couple rents a car from their service and go on a quest to drive all over America... all over-four-million miles of roads in it (Alamo didn't charge per mile). During this journey, they have a family, raising and educating their children (especially on geography). Their children also have grandchildren. By the time the journey is finished, it is 2028. The family assumes that they've covered all the miles in Alamo territory... until they learn that Alamo now has over 20,000 locations world wide. Now they have to travel over TWENTY million miles!
• For Super Bowl XLVIII, The Muppets, Terry Crews, and Toyota would like to remind you that there's No Room For Boring.
• Super Bowl XLIX saw the NFL produce one of their own of these with "Together We Make Football", showing tons of real and fictional people screaming and stomping, including ship captains, bus riders, mascots, the Mane Six of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, the penguins of Madagascar, the cast of The LEGO Movie, Keyboard Cat and Britney Spears.
  • It wasn't the first time they did this. For Super Bowl XLV, they rolled out an ad titled "Best Fans Ever", featuring characters from TV shows past and present geared up for the big game, ranging from classics like Happy Days, The Brady Bunch and Family Matters to more modern hits like The Big Bang Theory, Glee and The Office. The edits made to these scenes were quite convincing; a side by side comparison of the commercial and the unaltered scenes from each show can be found here.
  • From the same Super Bowl as "Together We Make Football", there was also massive Mood Whiplash for a domestic abuse website called "No More", in which an abused woman has to pretend to call for a pizza in order to get help. While it was well-received, it had some of the more cynical viewers wondering how they got it to air during such a lighthearted event.
  • Another Mood Whiplash example: Nationwide had a child safety ad featuring a boy who died from a preventable accident. Naturally, it (unlike the above-mentioned No More ad) received a massive backlash to the point where "Nationwide" became a trending topic on Twitter because of it.
  • On the lighter side of things, there's the ads for Bud Light, BMW and Doritos.
• Mexican beer brand Tecate's "Somos Bax" campaign began as a Mayweather vs. Pacquiao Special. It features Sylvester Stallone interrupting a man doing something not particularly manly by saying "TE HACE FALTA VER MÁS BOX"^note YOU NEED TO WATCH MORE BOXING.
• Super Bowl 50:
  • Skittles had one with Steven Tyler that has to be seen to be believed.
  • Nintendo also aired its first Super Bowl commercial, commemorating Pokémon's 20th anniversary.
  • Snickers also built on to its "you're not you" campaign by having Willem Dafoe as Marilyn Monroe, recreating the Signature Scene from The Seven Year Itch.
  • And then there's Mountain Dew's puppy-monkey-baby. See it here.
  • The NFL's Super Bowl Babies commercial, where a choir of people born in a town 9 months after their team won the Super Bowl sing a Super Bowl-themed song to the tune of Seal's "Kiss from a Rose".
• Super Bowl LI:
  • Audi's #DriveProgress commercial, featuring a girl racing in a soapbox derby and her father as the narrator, pondering about the idea that she'll be valued and paid less in life simply because she's female. The video received a very high dislike-to-like ratio.
  • On the more successful side, Snickers aired a live commercial.
  • As this article proves, a lot of 2017 ads went for a What Do You Mean, It's Not Political? attitude. For example, this haircare ad went for a not-so-subtle jab at Trump's hair.
• A few months after acquiring the film from Paramount, Netflix released ads during Super Bowl LII that The Cloverfield Paradox would be "coming very soon" — specifying during the fourth quarter that it was a Surprise Release that people could watch it as soon as the game ended. Analysts afterward considered this a genius marketing move for a movie that would have bombed if Paramount had kept it and released it the normal way.
• During Super Bowl LII, Amazon's Alexa lost her voice, so various celebrities pitched in to "help".
• Tide released an ad during Super Bowl LII that started out as various other types of Super Bowl commercials before David Harbour revealed they were all really Tide ads, because of how clean everyone's clothes were. Even after the first ad aired, it continued the campaign during the game, even hijacking an Old Spice ad as well as a Mr. Clean ad from the previous year.
• Super Bowl LIII saw the NFL release an ad celebrating the upcoming 100th season of the league. It featured a who's who of famous current and former NFL players attending a gala, which turns into an impromptu game when Marshawn Lynch tries to grab a bite of a giant cake without leaving his seat,^note Lynch is well-known in Real Life for his Sweet Tooth only to fall and knock off a golden football centerpiece on top of the cake. The ad is a Reference Overdosed collection of allusions to famous plays and elements of NFL lore: The 49ers-Cowboys rivalry, The Immaculate Reception, Odell Beckham's one-handed catch, the 1972 Dolphins drinking champagne, Patrick Mahomes' "No Look" pass, Peyton Manning's injury-plagued 2015 championship run, etc.
• For Super Bowl LV, ViacomCBS aired a commercial advertising Paramount+ (then known as CBS All Access)... featuring the Bikini Bottom Super Band playing "Sweet Victory" - many SpongeBob fans were elated to finally hear "Sweet Victory" in the Super Bowl broadcast, especially after the "Sicko Mode" incident two years prior during the halftime show. (Bonus points: the commercial aired during the first halftime commercial break, so in a way, they played the opening set for The Weeknd!)
  • That same Bowl featured a DoorDash commercial featuring Daveed Diggs and the cast of Sesame Street, directed by Michel Gondry and set to a reworking of "The People In Your Neighborhood". That week, DoorDash donated a dollar from every order to Sesame Workshop.
• Super Bowl LVI in 2022 notably had several cryptocurrency companies buy Super Bowl ads — and just as notably, the whole crypto market bombed within the year, earning the "Crypto Bowl" many comparisons to the "Dot-Com Bowl" of 2000 for the amount of money blown by tech companies in the middle of a bubble.
  • Matt Damon starred in an ad for Crypto.com that compared those who got in early on the crypto industry to the great explorers, inventors, and pioneers of the past, with the tagline "Fortune Favors the Brave". While it first premiered in October 2021, it went viral after it aired at the Super Bowl. Damon later admitted that he only did the ad to raise money for his charity, and seemed visibly embarrassed by it.
  • Coinbase aired an ad that was nothing but a minute of a QR code bouncing around a black screen while instrumental electronic music played. Scanning the QR code would take you to Coinbase's promotional website, where new sign-ups would receive a free $15 worth of bitcoin and be entered in a $3 million giveaway.
  • FTX's ad deserves special mention, as it featured Larry David in a campaign built around the idea that "This Is Going to Be Huge, so don't be the idiot who sees something revolutionary and declares that It Will Never Catch On." In November of that year, FTX was exposed as shockingly corrupt, leading to the business going bankrupt, its founder getting arrested for fraud, and David and FTX's other celebrity spokespeople even getting sued for their part in shilling a scam.
• Mars shocked everyone in January 2023 when, in light of the controversial redesigns of the characters as well as the introduction of the purple M&M, they announced that they would replace the M&M's spokecandies with Maya Rudolph, whom they believed everyone would agree on. As it turned out, this was nothing more than an elaborate publicity stunt for their Super Bowl LVII commercial (as evidenced by the tongue-in-cheek nature of Rudolph announcing the candy would be changed to "Ma&Yas" and have a photo of her on the shell instead of the M) and the spokecandies would resume their rightful place during the Big Game commercial itself.
• A similar thing happened when during the run-up to Super Bowl LIV in 2020, the longtime Planters mascot Mr. Peanut was killed off. The Bowl ad itself had various mascots mourning his demise, only for a baby version to materialize through the Swiss-Army Tears of Kool Aid Man. Said baby version became an adult eventually, and Mr. Peanut has stuck around ever since.
• During Super Bowl LVIII, a commercial for the movie If opened with Randall Park pretending to be John Krasinski in front of a disbelieving Ryan Reynolds, referencing Park playing "Asian Jim" on a single-scene cold open of The Office (US) twelve years earlier.

Fictional examples

• In the second episode of Futurama, Professor Farnsworth pays for a Planet Express commercial to air during the Super Bowl. "Not on the same channel, of course."
• Arthur, King of Time and Space, referenced here and then subverted here.
• In The Simpsons episode "Sunday Cruddy Sunday", Lisa and Marge see a commercial spoofing the music video for ZZ Top's "Legs", with 3 sexy women providing "service" for a man at a gas station. The camera zooms in as the man is staring at one of the women's cleavage, she has a cross necklace, prompting a voiceover saying "The Catholic Church: we've made a few changes.", to which Lisa says "These Super Bowl commercials are weird." The Catholic League, a Catholic anti-defamation organization, was unamused with this scene.
• Fade to Black, the fifth of Robert Goldsborough's officially-sanctioned continuation of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series, centers around industrial espionage between two ad agencies. The case is kicked off when one of the ad executives meets Archie Goodwin at a Superbowl party; one of the ads during the game is his agency's work.
• In an episode of Bob's Burgers, a retired football player ends up appearing in several local Super Bowl commercials for competing restaurants in Seymour's Bay.
• In an episode of Smart Guy, a schedule mix-up arranged by T.J. at a major DC cable station accidentally lands the Hendersons' homemade, low-budget commercial for their father's local roofing business (which T.J. had only wanted to be aired for "Sunday primetime") into a Superbowl halftime slot, displacing what is implied to be Coca-Cola's advert. While Floyd and his business enjoy the in-universe overnight meme status, T.J. frets about how his sabotage has cost the station millions.
• In Cold Case episode "Start-Up", Scott ruined Lionstaff by paying to have an ad for the company air during the Super Bowl without his business partner Amy's input or consent.

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