Thinking Back to Other Crass Super Bowl Ads

SalesGenie.com's bickering pandas were a pathetic use of $2.7 million, but they were also part of a long and not-so-proud tradition of tasteless, offensive or otherwise awful Super Bowl ads. These were three of them you might recall:

Bud Light's farting horse, 2004: I'm as sick as the next guy of pretending that the Budweiser Clydesdales are some kind of treasured national icon, but if this is the alternative...

GoDaddy's Congressional hearing, 2005: Is GoDaddy using scantily-clad bimbos to drive business, or is it making fun of ads that use scantily-clad bimbos to drive business? I think they'd probably say the latter, but the absolute lack of wit in this spot, which Fox aired once but refused to repeat during the same game, suggests otherwise.

Snickers's gay kiss, 2007: In retrospect, it's hard to see what anyone objected to about this ad, beyond its obviousness. Compared to SalesGenie's pandas, it's a Francois Truffaut film.

Unfortunately, I can't find a video of what still stands as the worst Super Bowl ad of the past decade: Just for Feet's 1999 spot featuring a barefoot Kenyan runner, hunted and captured, safari-style, by white men, and forced to don a pair of Nikes. The ad was so horrifically misguided, the shoe company sued Saatchi and Saatchi for damages, although it later dropped the suit.