Super Bowl 2013: 15 Worst Super Bowl Commercials of All-Time

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5. General Motors – Robot Suicide (2007)

Want to know what’s absolutely hilarious — suicide. Well, this is what the folks at General Motors thought back in 2007 before they ran their company into the ground and begged like bratty teenagers to be bailed out by the government. After seeing how this atrocity of a company treated their employees, it’s no surprise their sense of humor is — skewed.

The ad featured a cute robot losing his job, falling deep into depression and eventually killing himself by jumping off a bridge into icy waters. But hey, it’s alright because it was just a dream.

Cue the snare!

The message of the commercial was that GM takes it’s work so seriously it’s suicidal — or at least that’s what the message seemed to be. Either way if we didn’t figure out the company was run by morons then, we soon figured it out.

4. Holiday Inn – We Changed Our Hotels, Bob Johnson Changed His Sex (1997)

Transgender Humor. Nothing pulls Americans into hotel rooms like transvestites, or so Holiday Inn would like to think. Their 1997 ad is to this day one of the most awkward and hilariously insensitive ads to have ever aired on television. A guy returns to his high school reunion and is hit on by a former classmate, only the classmate doesn’t know he’s talking to a man because Bob Johnson has had a sex change.

The point of all this: Holiday Inn, like Bob Johnson, have made some significant changes to their hotels around the country so be sure to stop by and check them out.

Spoiler alert: holiday Inn changed virtually nothing and still sucks as a hotel chain, and their commercial still isn’t funny.

3. Groupon – Tibet Is in Peril, But We’re American So Who F%#&ing Cares? (2011)

Brain fart is the best way to describe why this ad exists. The premise is confusing, yet strikingly offensive. We live in an age where the rest of the world wants to murder, maim, behead and blow up Americans because they view us as arrogant and self-absorbed people who think we’re superior to ever other person and culture on earth.

So what’s the one way to try and shake that perception: create an ad that makes us look like arrogant, self-absorbed people who think we’re all superior beings. The ad starts out by telling of the perils Tibet is facing, but quickly shifts into a spiel about how Tibet had amazing cuisines and we can get them at a ridiculous discount if we use Groupon.

This is why everyone hates us.

2. Apple – The Lemmings (1985)

In 1984, Apple came out with one of the most innovative and radically different commercials in Super bowl history to introduce it’s new computer. But it’s follow up was dark, depressing and played like a Monty Python sketch only sans the dark humor. Basically the commercial is a bunch of workers in suits creepily whistling “Off to Work We Go” while walking off of a cliff — because nothing sells computers like mass suicide.

The payoff: buy an Apple computer so you don’t have to kill yourself.

The ad remains one of the worst Super Bowl ads ever and is routinely shown in business and advertising classes around the world as an example of what you do not want to do once hired for a job. A year after breaking onto the scene with an ad, Apple almost (ironically) killed itself with a follow up ad. To put into perspective how far back this ad set Apple, the company didn’t make another Super Bowl commercial until 1999 and didn’t hit it’s financial boom until the early-2000s.