10 Unforgettable Super Bowl Commercials

Each year, the Super Bowl mints winners and losers—and they aren’t just football teams. For brands and marketers, the big game offers an advertising juggernaut, a time when companies pour millions of dollars into crafting a commercial spot that will linger long after its 30 seconds of TV airtime have passed.

“That’s an enormous challenge, because you have only 30 seconds to communicate,” says Tim Calkins, a marketing professor who has been studying Super Bowl ads for more than two decades and who leads the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review at Northwestern University. “Maybe you have 60 seconds. It’s always fun to see which companies rise to the challenge and which ones miss the mark.”

Ever since the 1980s, when brands like Coca-Cola and Apple raised the bar for television ads, the commercials have been nearly as much of a draw for viewers as the game itself. Indeed, Super Bowl commercials from decades past offer a microhistory of how TV advertising has changed over the past half-century.

“All these marketers are studying the country and studying how people are feeling. They’re looking for: What are ideas that are likely to resonate in any given year?” says Calkins. “So the Super Bowl advertising is a bit of a reflection of where we are as a country and how people are feeling. That reflects both who shows up to advertise but also what are the creative themes that come across.”

Below, we look at 10 memorable moments in Super Bowl advertising history—and how they changed the industry itself.

Year: 1980 Brand: Coca-Cola

This Coca-Cola spot arrived at the dawn of modern Super Bowl advertising and ranks among the most widely referenced Super Bowl commercials of all time. (It actually first aired months earlier, in 1979, as brands often re-aired existing commercials during the big game back then.) Its storyline is simple: NFL star “Mean” Joe Greene is limping in frustration toward the locker room when a young boy offers him a Coke, which he swallows in one gulp. Newly refreshed, Greene happily tosses the boy his jersey and says, “Hey, kid … catch!” The catchphrase immortalized Greene and made the ad an instant classic, one that would be parodied in episodes of “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy” and by Coca-Cola itself, in a 2009 Coke Zero commercial. 

The original ad was penned by copywriter Penny Hawkey, who sought to “invite feelings, not just leave people with a visual impression.” In 2015, USA TODAY Sports described her creation as “the most well-known, popular and influential spot of all time.”

“It had no data. It had no facts and figures. It was a story,” says Calkins. “I think what marketers saw in there was that the Super Bowl is a platform where you can deliver really engaging messages. It was a spot that people even now remember and talk about.”

Year: 1984 Brand: Apple Computer

By 1984, budgets, concepts and anticipation surrounding Super Bowl ads were all growing. Some brands were partnering with big-budget directors to give their ads a gleam of Hollywood ambition. No such collaboration paid off like the iconic Apple spot produced by Fairbanks Films and directed by Ridley Scott—who, notably, made his name directing commercials before helming sci-fi movie hits like Alien and Blade Runner. 

The latter film’s dystopian chill clearly influenced “1984,” a bold and cinematic riff on the George Orwell novel of the same name. In the ad, throngs of gray-clad, emotionless workers sit and listen to a video address by a sinister, droning Big Brother-like figure. A young woman in a white tank top and bright orange shorts, striking against the sea of gray, sprints into the room wielding a sledgehammer, which she hurls at the telescreen, exploding it. Finally, a voiceover announces the launch of the Apple Macintosh personal computer—signifying the tech equivalent, perhaps, of this smashing of conformity.

Unlike most commercials, it offers no obvious meaning, no punchline, no product demonstration. But that’s what made it stand out, cementing Apple’s futuristic, anti-establishment image. It became a watershed moment in advertising. “The whole ad industry just stopped in their tracks and went: ‘What just happened? How did that happen?’” sports marketing expert David Stubley told CNN. TV Guide later named it the greatest commercial of all time, and The New York Times credited the ad with “populariz[ing] the concept of spectacular Super Bowl commercials.” Yet Apple’s follow-up ad, the so-called “Lemmings” commercial, which aired during the 1985 Super Bowl, flopped miserably in comparison. 

Year: 1987 Brand: Bud Light

This goofy 1987 clip, awash in ’80s scenes of poolside debauchery, introduced viewers to Bud Light’s popular canine mascot: Spuds MacKenzie, a bull terrier who loves to party. Animals tend to do well in Super Bowl ads, and this one was an undeniable hit, boosting beer sales and turning Spuds MacKenzie (seen in the original ad partying, riding in a convertible and playing drums) into a recurring mascot character. Only problem: The ad campaign was perhaps too successful, sparking a backlash from advocacy groups and conservative politicians, such as South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who accused Budweiser of trying to turn children into drinkers.

Year: 1993 Brand: McDonald’s

By 1993, celebrity cameos were a common ingredient in the most talked-about Super Bowl ads. And few celebrities were more talked about than NBA superstars Michael Jordan and Larry Bird, who appeared together in this memorable McDonald’s spot. Battling for a Big Mac and fries, the two athletes play a heated game of HORSE, devising increasingly preposterous shots (“off the floor, off the scoreboard, off the backboard…”) while still hitting “nothing but net.”

“It was a really effective spot because it was so entertaining,” says Calkins. “People loved to watch that spot. But also, from a marketing perspective, it was all about the product. And it was all about how much they both wanted McDonald’s. That made it a really powerful spot that worked well for the brand.”

Year: 1995 Brand: Budweiser

Eight years after introducing Spuds MacKenzie, Bud needed a fresh mascot. They found three—a trio of frogs, each croaking one syllable: “Bud,” “Weis” and “Er.” Then the camera pulls back, revealing a tavern with a neon Budweiser sign. Like the best commercials, it’s simple, silly and a little bit surreal. (And it was directed by future Pirates of the Caribbean filmmaker Gore Verbinski, who instills the big reveal with some visual panache.)

“That’s another Super Bowl ad that people really remember,” says Calkins. “It was this really distinctive piece of advertising that was all about the brand.” Indeed, Adweek later described the spot as “one of the most iconic alcohol campaigns in advertising history.” It yielded a number of spin-offs, including a similar campaign featuring lizards instead of frogs, and it was memorably parodied on "The Simpsons."

Year: 2003 Brand: FedEx

In 2000, a FedEx package played an outsized role in the plot of the survival blockbuster Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks. Two years later, FedEx—with the help of the ad agency BBDO New York—capitalized on the film’s popularity with a commercial parodying its ending. In it, a bearded plane crash survivor finally delivers a package to its owner (“because,” he explains, “I work for FedEx”), only to learn that its contents could have proven very useful on the island. Movie parodies frequently elicit groans, but this one proved witty and clever in getting the brand’s message across—namely, that FedEx workers get the job done. In 2025, Entertainment Weekly ranked it among the top 10 Super Bowl commercials of all time. 

Year: 2008 Brand: E-Trade

In 2008, E-Trade, the online trading platform, wanted to broadcast that buying stocks on E-Trade is so easy, even a baby could do it. So they got a literal baby to star in two memorably bizarre ads. In one, the gesticulating baby brags that he just bought a stock, then throws up on his keyboard. Gross? Yes. But also unique. In another, the baby preaches the benefits of E-Trade’s 401(k) plans from his highchair.

The commercials were an instant hit during the early YouTube era; by 2009, they had amassed more than 2 million views on the streaming site. The baby (and other babies, too) wound up starring in similarly themed E-Trade commercials for years. “Merging 1989's Look Who's Talking with Wall Street bro audio (and purposely low-fi video to add to the realness), E-Trade hit the conceptual jackpot,” wrote Entertainment Weekly in 2025.

Year: 2010 Brand: Google

For years, Google avoided traditional advertising. But by 2010, once-scrappy upstarts like the search engine company had become corporate titans with images to protect and brands to promote. So Google made waves with its first Super Bowl ad, “Parisian Love,” which was hardly a conventional Super Bowl ad—it featured no actors, no celebrities, no humans period. Instead, it told the story of a study-abroad meet-cute blossoming into a marriage, told entirely through Google searches. The spot first appeared on YouTube months before the big game. But, as Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt explained, it got such a positive reception “that we decided to share it with a wider audience.”

The ad “really broke through the clutter,” says Calkins. “It told a story. But it was fundamentally a product demonstration. What the ‘Parisian Love’ spot did was to really show people all the different things that Google can do. But it did it in a way of telling a story.”

Year: 2011 Brand: Volkswagen

Created by the ad agency Deutsch, a playful Star Wars parody became Volkswagen’s first Super Bowl commercial in more than a decade. The concept is cute enough: A child in a Darth Vader costume tries in vain to use “The Force” to perform various household tasks. Eventually, to his shock, he manages to start the family’s Volkswagen 2012 Passat—unaware that his father is actually controlling it via a remote key fob.

What really made the commercial consequential was its rollout. Volkswagen released a longer version of the ad (60 seconds instead of 30) on YouTube four days before the game. This was nontraditional—brands normally premiered their biggest ads as a surprise during the Super Bowl—but made marketing sense during the era of viral reach. “The Force” had already amassed 17 million views on YouTube before it reached television audiences during the game. In other words, as Deutsch executive Mike Sheldon put it, “It paid for itself before it ever ran.”

In 2015, TIME identified “The Force” as the most shared Super Bowl ad of all time and argued that its success substantially changed how advertisers approach the big game: “Instead of standalone spots, Super Bowl ads have become the anchors of extended marketing campaigns with vast social media presences often launched weeks before the game.”

Year: 2012 Brand: Honda

By the early 2010s, high-profile commercials often relied on celebrity cameos in lieu of an actual idea. But this 2012 Honda CR-V ad deployed Matthew Broderick cleverly—by parodying his most famous film, particularly the scenes where Ferris Bueller takes a coveted vehicle for a joyride. In this version, a still-youthful Broderick calls in sick from shooting and spends a day on the town in his Honda CR-V. The spot packs a lot of sight gags (most of them Ferris Bueller references) into just 60 seconds, and Forbes highlighted it as one of the funniest advertisements of Super Bowl XLVI.