The New York Giants and the New England Patriots might be headlining this year’s Super Bowl, but the annual football fiesta is also a time for advertisers to put their game faces on. For a sum of money equal to some countries’ gross national products, companies can reach one of the year’s biggest viewing audiences.
Last year, Super Bowl XLV set a record for the most U.S. viewers for a single broadcast, nabbing 111 million pairs of eyes and beating the previous year’s total by almost five million. And this year, the cost of a Super Bowl ad reflects it. According to Forbes, the average price for a 30-second commercial is $3.5 million.
So how to make the most out of the advertising investment? Companies can play it a few ways. In 1984, Apple went all prophetic with its “1984” spot featuring a jogger taking a sledgehammer to IBM, which was masquerading as Big Brother.
In 1979, Coca-Cola’s “Mean Joe Greene” ad saw a kid melt the gruff footballer with a bottle of fizz water. And though Victoria’s Secret ads are so steamy you have to squeegee the condensation off your screen, they follow the 1973 Noxzema spot with Joe Namath and Farrah Fawcett, and the 1992 one featuring Cindy Crawford sensuously sipping a Pepsi.
Our favourite, though, are funny ads. The wise-cracking ones, the subtly sly ones, the ones that garner a grin or merit a knee-slap. And to that end, here are 10 Super Bowl commercials that tickled our funny bones, in no particular order.
Click here for 10 funny Super Bowl ads
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