Super Bowl Ads and Commercials: The Highlights
If one thing is clear about this year’s Super Bowl ads, they all had a common theme of giving in-your-face messages about things that haunt our souls. But while the commercial game, in general, might have been the saddest we’ve witnessed probably ever, other very few advertisers delivered the laughs, the celeb cameos, and the cute animals that undoubtedly can do no wrong.
Ultimately, these ads gave a mixed bag of awesome and absurd. So here, we’ve compiled the very best from the advertisers that outdid themselves in the WTF department, as well as those that stood out as frontrunners.
The Highlights
Kim Kardashian appears in a very important PSA for selfies, which ended up being surprisingly funny. A deserving, clever, and probably very expensive ad from T-Mobile:
This Mophie commercial might have been categorized as more WTF with its apocalyptic scenes—dogs walking people, fish raining from the sky, ferris wheels on the loose—but the ending made this commercial one of the best this year:
If there’s one way to get Americans behind something, it’s to make fun of the celebrity that endorses it. And that’s exactly what happens here in Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel’s ad for BMW that features a 1997 flashback of the two being skeptical about the internet:
Matt Damon makes a cameo in Mindy Kaling’s ad for Nationwide (the superior Nationwide ad, clearly) when Kaling tries to kiss him. It’s short and hilarious, and she even got a Damon selfie out of it:
Budweiser learned from its commercial past, and brought back the famous lost horse and puppy that stole everyone’s hearts:
WTF?
Perhaps the largest “whaaat?” standout was Nationwide’s “Make Safe Happen” ad. Nationwide sincerely bummed everyone out by letting us all know that in spite of your fun time watching football, kids are dying from accidents:
This Weight Watchers ad not only made us feel fat, but also had Jesse Pinkman’s voice talking at us over b-roll of fried foods like we are food addicts. But actually, it’s just that curly fries are really, really good:
It all starts with a kick “come alive” in this Mtn Dew Kickstart commercial when everything starts dancing, and a dog’s limbs move around in ways that it shouldn’t. You know things are getting crazy when a deer emerges from the wall:
Jeff Bridges is talking to us in a weird voice in his commercial for his Sleeping Tapes album that no one even knew was happening (hosted by SquareSpace!):
Lindsay Lohan makes a cameo as a crazy person (or maybe just playing herself) as she bounds through the streets in a minivan attempting to pick up a child from school. Cue the potential meme about kid not making it home from school because he died in a Nationwide commercial:
