11 Worst Super Bowl Commercials of All Time, Ranked (VIDEO)

Maybe if NFL referees throw penalty flags during the ad breaks and not just during football games, we wouldn’t have ended up with the abysmal Super Bowl ads below. Every year, brands spend millions to produce and air commercials during the big game, and often, they have to issue public apologies for campaigns gone awry.

The web host GoDaddy is a frequent offender, and it earned three spots on our list of worst Super Bowl commercials of all time. See our selections below — if you can handle the cringe factor — and let us know in the comments if there were Super Bowl ads that repelled you more.

11. GoDaddy’s “Big Kiss” (2013)

We don’t object to GoDaddy proclaiming to be a sexy and smart web host by having supermodel Bar Refaeli kiss the nerdy “Walter,” played by actor Jesse Heiman. It’s amplified sounds of slobbery lip smacking against slobbery lip that have us in revolt.

10. Mountain Dew’s “Puppy Monkey Baby” (2016)

To hype up its Kickstart blend of “Dew, juice, and caffeine,” Mountain Dew introduced another combination of “three awesome things”: a Frankensteined puppy-monkey-baby with an annoying theme song and no sense of personal space. Way to “Kickstart” nightmares, Dew.

9. GoDaddy’s “Journey Home” (2015)

More than 40,000 people signed a Change.org petition protesting a GoDaddy commercial in which a lost puppy makes a long journey home just be sold online by its owner. The ad is both heartless in tone and tone-deaf in content, seemingly giving approval to puppy mills and private dog breeding.

8. Squarespace’s “5 to 9” (2021)

The legacy of 9 to 5 is tarnished by this ad about office drones going from working their day jobs to working their side gigs. “’Cause it’s hustlin’ time, a whole new way to makе a livin’” Dolly Parton sings before chanting “workin’ workin’ workin’” in the outro. As so many Americans try to survive capitalism by working multiple jobs, Squarespace didn’t read the room.

7. General Motors’ “Robot” (2007)

After a GM factory robot drops a bolt and gets laid off, it becomes so despondent that it takes a seemingly fatal jump off a bridge. The end of the ad reveals it was all a bad dream, as the narrator claims everyone at the carmaker is “obsessed with quality.” GM edited the ad, however, from public outcry and a complaint from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

6. HomeAway’s “Test Baby” (2011)

For this ad, the erstwhile vacation rental platform HomeAway imagines a testing facility for hotel rooms, one in which a stressed dad accidentally catapults a human-like “test baby” into a glass wall. HomeAway banished the ad after speaking to viewers left them “concerned that [the] ad trivializes violence toward children.”

5. GoDaddy’s “Shower” (2009)

Years before the deepfake porn issue, GoDaddy offended us with its ad depicting three lecherous college students using their computer browser to compel racer driver Danica Patrick — and then a “German woman from the dean’s office” — to take a shower on their demand. It’s just a nonstop case of the icks.

4. Groupon’s “Save the Money – Tibet” (2011)

Groupon users can save money, but the company couldn’t save face after airing this ad, which starts off as a PSA about the plight of Tibetans before explaining how Groupon can reduce the bill at a Tibetan restaurant. Activists called out the spot, saying it “trivializes the suffering and oppression of Tibetans under Chinese rule,” as NPR reported.

3. Snickers’ “Mechanics” (2007)

Two auto mechanics accidentally kiss as they eat a Snickers bar Lady and the Tramp-style, panic, and then try to reaffirm their heterosexuality by doing “something manly” — namely, ripping out a handful of chest hair. Worse yet, the Snickers website hosted a video of Super Bowl XLI players reacting with disgust to the kiss. Nothing about this homophobic ad makes us snicker.

2. SalesGenie’s “Panda Psychic” (2008)

Two pandas using SalesGenie to drum up business for their bamboo furniture business? Sure. But those pandas speaking with stereotypical Chinese accents? That’s the kind of racist stabs at humor that would make a CEO apologize. (And he did.)

1. Just for Feet’s “Kenyan Runner” (1999)

A group of white men hunt down a Black runner in a Hummer and then drug him, all to force running shoes onto his bare feet. We don’t know what’s worse: the depiction of roofying or the cavalier attitude toward racial violence. But we do know the now-defunct Just for Feet sued the ad agency behind the commercial for $10 million.