Worst superbowl adds

Forget the play-by-play: these days, Super Bowl ads have become as much of an institution as the game itself. And why wouldn’t they be? Companies relish the chance to reach as many as 130-140 million people at one time, pulling out all the stops to create a knockout advertisement that will stick with its viewers. Due to the size of this audience, though, the ads don’t come cheap (an estimated $3 million for a 30-second spot this year), so companies willing to spend that much better be sure that they have designed a foolproof ad that will get their message across.

This process of developing the ad campaigns unveiled at the Super Bowl can take months. Sometimes, it’s a success, and the result is commercials that will never be forgotten: the 1984 Apple commercial directed by Ridley Scott; the “Mean” Joe Green Coca-Cola commercial, so popular that it is being remade this year; and a character that prompted an internet campaign, Reebok’s Terry Tate: Office Linebacker. When an ad really takes a hold of the audience, it’s easy to justify the giant spend.

But for every Super Bowl advertisement that finds success, there are countless others that are best described as enormous failures. A new cleaning product? The entire dot-com era? Cartoon panda bears? These advertisers chose to throw down the big bucks necessary for a Super Bowl ad spot, and we’ll bet you’ve never heard of the product they’re pushing – so much for a captive audience.

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In Pictures: Failed Super Bowl ads

For obvious reasons, most of the companies that choose to advertise during the Super Bowl are those who sell products the average football fan can relate to – trucks, chips, beer are a few of the usual suspects. While you’re watching the game, it’s likely that you’ll have a beer in your hand and a bag of chips on your lap. Somewhat less likely is the idea that the average Super Bowl viewer would be gearing up for spring cleaning during halftime – maybe that’s the reason why there has only been one advertisement highlighting the efficiency of PS Cleaning Solutions, which happened to feature the charming image of people in HAZMAT suits.

In the late ’90s, the boom in Silicon Valley was on everyone’s radar. And perhaps no company better epitomized the dot-com era than a website called Computer.com. The company, started by two friends in 1999, was designed to answer all your questions about computers on a help site that was quick and easy. They raised $7 million to start the organization, and then spent half of it on Super Bowl ads.

Initially, it seemed like the partners’ risky advertising gamble had proven a success: at its peak in the days following the ad, the site was recording an impressive 2,200 hits per second. But their glory would turn out to be short lived with the proverbial dot-com era bubble burst. Just 10 months after launching Computer.com, and pinning the hopes of nearly the entire company on a Super Bowl ad, the site was sold to Office Depot.

But an ad does not need to be a dot-com start-up, nor involve HAZMAT suits to be considered a failure. Sometimes, all you need to turn a prized ad spot into a gargantuan waste of budget is none other than cartoon pandas.

In 2007, SalesGenie ran a 30-second ad featuring animated pandas that owned “Ling Ling’s Bamboo’s Furniture Shack” and spoke in what could best be described as stereotypical (and offensive) Chinese accents. Shortly after the commercial aired, Portfolio.com wrote, “Don’t doubt for a second that SalesGenie is going to face protests over this. I just talked to a spokesman for OCA, an Asian-Pacific Americans advocacy group. ‘We found it really racist,’ he says. ‘We’ll be discussing how to respond once we have everybody in the office, but some of our members have already been contacting us. It was really offensive.’” What did their $2.6 million earn SalesGenie? The title of the Least Popular Ad, according to USA TODAY’s 2007 Super Bowl Ad Meter.

Five failures:

1. Silestone: Slideshow
2. Sales Genie: Slideshow
3. Napster: Slideshow
4. Network Associates: Slideshow
5. MBNA: Slideshow