Collection
Super Bowl
Spots that used — or created — the biggest stage in advertising. The Super Bowl became an annual cultural event for ads largely because of work like this.
2020s
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2025Act Like You Know
Actors, Walton Goggins tells the camera, can make you believe they know what they are doing when they do not.
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2024Like a Good Neighbaaa
State Farm treated its return to the Super Bowl like a film release.
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2024Michael CeraVe
A Super Bowl ad that was really the final act of a three-week online hoax.
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2024All the Ads
One Super Bowl ad that turned everybody else's into prizes.
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2023Forever
A chocolate Lab puppy called Bear and a girl called Ava grow up together in sixty seconds, through childhood and college to Ava having a child of…
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2022Less Talk, More Bitcoin
For most of a minute, a small QR code drifted across a black screen, changing colour each time it touched an edge — a knowing riff on the bouncing…
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2021Superb Owl
Five seconds, bought market by market.
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2020Groundhog Day
Bill Murray wakes at 6:00 a.m. to the same clock-radio song and runs into Stephen Tobolowsky’s relentless Ned Ryerson — but this time Phil Connors…
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2020Smaht Pahk
The new Sonata could slip into a tight space at the click of a button, but the feature had a forgettable name: Remote Smart Parking Assist.
2010s
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2019We All Win
Children with limited mobility talk about what gaming gives them and show how they play with the Xbox Adaptive Controller, which Microsoft designed…
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2018Alexa Loses Her Voice
Alexa coughs mid-forecast and falls silent, and Jeff Bezos, playing himself, is assured by his staff that replacements are standing by.
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2018It's a Tide Ad
The cleverest media hack in Super Bowl history.
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2017Calling JohnMalkovich.com
John Malkovich, newly launched as a menswear designer, sits in his studio on the phone to another John Malkovich, the man who already owns…
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2017Daughter
A girl in a battered helmet races a soapbox cart downhill against a field of boys while her father, in voiceover, wonders what to tell her: that…
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2017The Journey
A mother and her young daughter leave Mexico and head north on foot, by truck and by train, intercut with construction workers building something we…
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2016Super Bowl Babies Choir
For its 50th Super Bowl, the NFL turned a piece of sports folklore into a choir.
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2014It's Beautiful
"America the Beautiful" passes from voice to voice and from language to language (seven of them, by Coca-Cola's count) over a montage of American…
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2014Puppy Love
A Labrador puppy has fallen for a Clydesdale, and even after it is adopted it keeps coming back home to the horse.
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2014#LikeAGirl
A casting session as social experiment.
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2013Farmer
Essentially a two-minute slideshow that never speaks its brand name, "Farmer" lays the late broadcaster Paul Harvey's original recording of "So God…
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Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark.Oreo (Mondelēz)2013
Dunk in the Dark
The most famous tweet in marketing.
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2012Halftime in America
A lean silhouette walks down a darkened stadium tunnel and Clint Eastwood's rasp begins: "It's halftime in America, too." For two minutes,…
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2011Born of Fire ("Imported from Detroit")
A bankrupt car company from a written-off city bought the longest Super Bowl ad to that point — two full minutes during Super Bowl XLV, February 6,…
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2011The Force
A pint-sized Darth Vader tries to use the Force on the laundry machine, the dog, a sandwich — and finally, apparently, on the family Passat,…
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2010Parisian Love
Google's first-ever TV commercial told a love story using nothing but a search box: "study abroad paris france" leads to "impress a french girl,"…
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2010Game ("Betty White")
The spot that launched one of the most durable creative platforms in modern advertising.
2000s
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2009Free Doritos
In an office break room, a worker insists his snow globe is a crystal ball, predicts free Doritos for everyone, then hurls it through the glass…
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2008Baby
A baby at a computer keyboard, speaking in an adult man's voice, brushes off the idea that he is too young to invest.
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2003Terry Tate: Office Linebacker
A 300-pound linebacker levels office workers for leaving no coffee in the pot.
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2002Respect
Five months after September 11, the Budweiser Clydesdales leave their stables, travel through snowy countryside and over the Brooklyn Bridge, then…
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2000Cat Herders
How to make an invisible IT company famous in sixty seconds: take the management cliché "it's like herding cats" literally.
1990s
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1999Whassup?
Proof that advertising can borrow culture honestly instead of manufacturing it.
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1999When I Grow Up
The dot-com era's one unarguably great Super Bowl ad.
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1995Frogs
Three frogs on a swamp log croak one syllable each — "Bud," "weis," "er" — until the croaks sync into the brand name.
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1993The Showdown (Jordan vs. Bird)
Michael Jordan and Larry Bird play an escalating game of H-O-R-S-E for a Big Mac — "off the expressway, over the river, off the billboard, through…
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1992Hare Jordan
Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny team up in a gym to outwit a gang of basketball bullies, mixing live action with hand-drawn Looney Tunes slapstick…
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1992New Can
A red Lamborghini pulls into a dusty roadside café, Cindy Crawford steps out in a white tank top and cut-offs, and two small boys stare as she buys…
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1991Uh-Huh (You Got the Right One, Baby)
Ray Charles sits at a grand piano with a big band behind him, while three backing singers in black minidresses and wigs answer each line with a…
1980s
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1989Bud Bowl
Anheuser-Busch turned Super Bowl XXIII, on January 22, 1989, into a game within the game.
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1987Spuds MacKenzie: The Original Party Animal
A limousine pulls up outside a club and the guest of honor appears: a bull terrier with a black patch over one eye who, by the end, is strutting…
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19841984
A product launch staged as dystopian cinema.
1970s
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1979Hey Kid, Catch! ("Mean Joe Greene")
The template for the heartwarming Super Bowl spot.
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1977Monks ("Brother Dominic")
The ad that proved the Super Bowl could launch a product story, seven years before Apple's "1984." Monk Brother Dominic, asked to produce 500 more…
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1974Tough Under Fire
A marksman loads a .30-caliber rifle, aims at a padlock hanging on a bull's-eye target and, in slow motion, blows a half-inch hole clean through it.
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Let Noxzema cream your face.Noxzema1973
Let Noxzema Cream Your Face
Joe Namath, the Jets quarterback and Super Bowl III MVP, grins into the camera: "I'm so excited.
About Super Bowl
The Super Bowl is the one night of the year when American audiences watch the ads on purpose. These are the best Super Bowl commercials of all time, chosen for what they did with that stage rather than for what they cost.
Apple's "1984" showed that a single airing could become national news. Since then, brands have used the game to launch products, reinvent themselves and start conversations that carry on long after the final whistle. A 30-second slot now costs millions of dollars, so every spot here is also a case study in making a huge, expensive bet pay off.
What makes a great Super Bowl ad
- An idea simple enough to land in a noisy room full of people.
- A reason to talk about it the next morning.
- A clear link to the brand, so the laughs don't go to someone else.