If you’d tried to run an ad during this year’s Super Bowl (I can say that, right? I can say “Super Bowl”?) you would have paid around $5.6 million for 30 seconds of airtime. (You also probably would have previewed the ad online anyway, which kind of makes me wonder what the point is? I mean, I know there’s a point, and I pretty much know what it is, but I also still kind of wonder what the point is.)
(Like, “Hey, remember how fun it always is to watch the Super Bowl and see what huge, high-concept, big-budget ads all the brands are running? What if we took part of that fun away?”)
Anyway, there are the ads that run during the Super Bowl, and the ones that run before and during the Super Bowl, and then there are ads that don’t make it to the Big Game at all. Maybe it’s a budget issue. Maybe it’s a content issue. But that doesn’t mean it’s a quality issue, and we’re going to highlight the best of them right here, right now.
(Note: A lot of ads that never made it were rejected by the network for sexual content, and you know what? Whatever. Bo-ring. Anyone can have some hot chicks in bikinis, carrying around melons as a cheap boob metaphor and/or replacing a man’s caracturistically harridanish wife with someone young and sexy and, one assumes, sexually obedient. It takes real creativity to get banned for creativity — or to make an ad that gets as much buzz as the rest without having to pay for primetime.)
Here’s to five ads that didn’t actually make it into the Su — shit, the Big Game.
Pornhub
“But Caperton!” you’re saying. “You just said you aren’t showing any ads with sex in them!” Hush up, I know what I’m doing. This ad for a streaming porn site is almost disconcertingly wholesome, but was rejected anyway by the network in 2013 for being… an ad for a streaming porn site. Two people in separate bathtubs selling boner pills? Acceptable. Put them on the same bench? WHOA, NOW.
Acreage Holdings
In a completely different direction is last year’s ad from Acreage Holdings, showing individuals and families whose lives have been made infinitely better by this one drug. It’s emotional and stirring and occasionally hard to watch. It’s also asking viewers to call their members of Congress in support of legalized medical marijuana, which apparently offends CBS just as much as two elderly people on a park bench does.
Bud Light, “Swear Jar” (DDB Chicago)
Once again, the puritanical network pulls the plug on an ad that doesn’t have an inch of bare skin or a single audible swear word. This ad, full of office workers just trying to raise money for some Bud Light, might not have been good enough for CBS in 2008, but it’s good enough for me.
Old Spice, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” (Wieden+Kennedy)
THAT’S RIGHT, MFers: This masterpiece of an ad didn’t actually run during the Super Bowl. It debuted February 9, 2010, two days after Super Bowl XLIV. (Fun fact: The ad was frantically thrown together at the last minute in response to the announcement that Unilever would be running an ad for Dove Men + Care during the game, and I don’t even remember what that one was about, but this one has held up for a decade.) Its enduring awesomeness has even carried up to this past weekend, wherein we learned that The Man has a son. And of course he does. What woman wouldn’t want to make a baby with a man who has two tickets to that thing you love?
Newcastle, “If We Made It” (droga5)
Newcastle’s 2014 non-Super Bowl campaign was actually all about the ad they wished they could have made. An entire microsite included teasers, storyboard highlights, and behind-the-scenes videos of the distinct lack of advertisement. I include this video here not because I have a hetero girl crush on Anna Kendrick or anything but because of the iconic celebrity endorsement, “Newcastle Brown Ale — the only beer that ever promised me a high-paying role in a [bleep] commercial and then backed out at the last [bleep] second like a bunch of [bleep]. Suck it.”
Honorable Mention: Skittles, “Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical”
In 2019, Skittles saved its Super Bowl money and opted instead to put on a one-night-only musical at a famous NYC theater, featuring Michael C. Hall and other Broadway greats performing such anti-consumerism classics as “Advertising Ruins Everything.” (I mean, tell me he isn’t a little bit right. Let’s not kid ourselves.) In case you weren’t able to get tickets to the show, an original cast album is available on Spotify.
Ticket proceeds, ftr, were donated to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, so lucky theatergoers even got to do a good deed while seeing Michael C. Hall in a cat costuming dying onstage.
(Oops. Spoiler.)
Have I missed any great non-Super Bowl ads? Let’s give some love to the unloved (and to the creatives were all, “Mom, I made a Super Bowl ad!” and then had nothing to show for it).