Here Is the Secret Behind the Super Bowl’s Worst Ads

I want to tell you about a kiss. It happened 10 years ago, but I still can’t forget it. And neither can you.

It was the kiss that turned heads and stomachs alike: supermodel Bar Refaeli sucking face with supernerd “Walter.” For Refaeli: a pastel-pink designer dress with a ruched bodice; for Walter: a boxy polo, Salvation Army tie, and eczema. As the unlikely pair locked lips and swapped saliva in an uncomfortably long close-up, households across America squirmed in front of their high-def TVs. The internet returned a swift verdict, and critics agreed: What a terrible ad.

GoDaddy’s 2013 Super Bowl commercial “Perfect Match” was hardly the first of the company’s crass efforts to earn pans. And yet, even by the brand’s standards, this ad underperformed. According to USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter, the commercial scored 3.30 out of 10 with panelists, the lowest measured that year.

The ad flopped on social media too, mustering only a 14 percent positive sentiment. And it wasn’t simply that the commercial failed to win over the football audience; the framing of “sexy meets smart” also raised hackles. If Walter is the brainy one, is Refaeli meant to be dumb? Others denounced it less for insensitivity than lack of chemistry. “Model Bar Refaeli looks like she really doesn’t want to kiss actor Jesse Heiman,” wrote Fast Company’s Teressa Iezzi, “but then goes ahead and does anyway, for an extended period of time? Why? Because she’s in a GoDaddy commercial.” The ad might be titled “Perfect Match,” but according to Iezzi, it’s “Perfectly Yecch.”

Advertisers can’t afford not to show up. The Super Bowl of advertising is, after all, the Super Bowl.

It goes without saying that buying an advertising spot during the Super Bowl is an extraordinary investment. Ten years ago, the cost of a 30-second commercial averaged $4 million. (It’s now $7 million, if you’re counting.) Even for a multibillion-dollar company like GoDaddy, snagging a slot during such high-viewership programming is a pricey venture—and a risky one. Still, brands continue shelling out, even if the prospect of failure looms large.

Failure isn’t simply a possibility, though; it’s all but assured. Esquire writer Brady Langmann states the obvious when he observes that the majority of Super Bowl ads are, objectively, awful. And yet, when given a choice, many companies would prefer to be awful than absent. Flop or no flop, advertisers can’t afford not to show up. The Super Bowl of advertising is, after all, the Super Bowl.

There are, however, significant downsides to awfulness. On a corporate level, a failed advertising campaign can meaningfully hurt a brand’s value. And on a consumer level, the damage is, well, even more painful: “Bad Super Bowl commercials aren’t as memorable as they are a regrettable tattoo on your brain,” Langmann explains, “bound to live there forever until removed via craniotomy.” That recurring vision you have of Guy Fieri shoving Bud Light Seltzer down your throat? Only the scalpel will save you.

It’s easy to blame ad agencies when commercials bomb, but I would argue that their clients bear equal, if not more, responsibility. As a former tag-line copywriter, I remember the frustration my fellow creatives and I would feel after we’d presented dozens of ideas only for the CMO to pick the dud of the bunch. And in high-pressure situations like the Super Bowl, the decision-making process is rarely foolproof. The CEO may not know the first thing about advertising, but when it’s game time, suddenly he can’t stop himself from subbing in.

There are other reasons why Super Bowl commercials so often fall flat. For one, great ads typically cost a lot of money to produce, and even the richest companies will sometimes skimp. (If the airtime alone costs millions, there may not be much left in the coffers.) And then there’s the stress factor. Just as certain athletes may perform poorly when the lights shine brightest, some creative directors may fumble when they know what’s on the line.

But maybe the truest explanation is also the most counterintuitive: Many Super Bowl ads aren’t actually trying to be good. They’re just out to shock us awake, to sizzle our brains, to spike our dopamine. And in this effort, a bad ad can serve quite well—especially if it’s truly, exponentially, off-the-charts bad. It must be, in other words, a spectacle. It must be the worst TV kiss of all time.

In response to GoDaddy’s 2013 Super Bowl smooch, Charles R. Taylor, a marketing professor at Villanova School of Business, offers a scathing assessment: “While the ad did get noticed, social media action was overwhelmingly negative and the ad was ranked at the bottom of 2013’s ads by experts and consumers alike. The very negative reaction appears to be prompting [the company], which has had outstanding success in building awareness, to focus more on its products and what it stands for going forward. The ad illustrates that getting attention is not always a good thing.” There is no debating that GoDaddy produced an absolute stinker. But Taylor’s comments fail to account for one central, if inconvenient, fact: The stinker was a screaming success.

Here’s Barb Rechterman, GoDaddy’s chief marketing officer at the time, gloating to Forbes: “Whether you loved it or hated it, it’s a memorable spot, and that spot, by the way, helped us achieve our best sales day ever, the Monday after the Super Bowl.” In the 24 hours after “Perfect Match” aired, GoDaddy added 10,000 customers, and hosting sales jumped 45 percent. And sure, the social media engagement might have been largely negative, but that metric overlooks the sheer scale of that engagement: The ad inspired roughly 300,000 tweets, more than any other 2013 Super Bowl ad. It didn’t matter that people hated it; what mattered was that everyone hated it.

GoDaddy’s marketing strategy has shifted in recent years, however, and the brand’s smutty Super Bowl ads are now a thing of the past. So, it might be tempting to concur with Taylor that “Perfect Match” prompted sufficient blowback to change hearts and minds within the company. But maybe the reality is that the ad did its job, and it did it so well that the campaign could retire a champion. When asked why GoDaddy decided to stop running Super Bowl ads in 2015, new CMO Phil Bienert declared, “We have 80 percent brand awareness. We don’t need that megaphone.” Yes, but how did the company achieve all that in the first place? It wasn’t by whispering.

Making ads that everyone hates is not a viable strategy for all brands. It would not behoove a family-friendly business like Disney to sully its name, nor would a luxury outfit like Mercedes benefit from trafficking in vulgarity. And there is, no doubt, a fine line between a disastrous ad and a true debacle. (That line, by the way, is what Kendall Jenner crossed, in a spot from 2017, when she handed a Pepsi to a police officer at a Black Lives Matter protest.) But for brands that are more concerned with building rather than curating an image, bad is a fast—and cheap—way to get there.

This Sunday, you’ll witness a wide range of commercials. Some goofy, some serious, some pulling at your heartstrings. But all are playing the same game of high-low poker. The point, as Rechterman put it, is not whether you love or hate an ad. It’s that the ad falls on either end of that spectrum: the best of the best or the worst of the worst, but nothing in between. Our advertising is no less polarized than our politics.

If you see an ad so mind-bendingly terrible that you suspect it may take you years of therapy to unsee it, take comfort in the fact that it’s probably no accident. The ad isn’t so much failing at being good as it is succeeding at being bad. And maybe, just maybe, if it’s truly off-the-charts heinous, you’ll never have to endure another Super Bowl commercial from that brand again. It will have already made its mark.