Best Super Bowl Commercial
BEST SUPER BOWL COMMERCIAL – January 10, 2024 – Warwick, Rhode Island, USA
Rodrick ran up the stairway taking two steps at a time. He burst into the rented office space that was once part of a hardware store and called for all Kidzercize employees to listen up. The six other people in the open room raised their heads from computer screens.
“I’ve got the biggest news since we started,” Rodrick began breathlessly. “We’re going to be in the Super Bowl!”
“What do you mean? Down on the field with the teams?” one of the newest employees asked.
“No, we’re gonna have a commercial. I won a contest on TikTok. They’re giving us a 15 second commercial. A billion people will see it. We’ll triple revenue. In a few months we’ll buy our own building.”
“Hey, slow down,” Rodrick’s father, Kent, interjected. The two men looked nearly identical, although Kent had a twenty-five-year head start on his son and his jet-black hair was sprinkled with gray. “Explain again who’s giving us the commercial time.”
“TikTok. They get blamed for every bad thing that happens on social media so they want positive publicity. I sent in a video about Kidzercize and they thought it was a good cause.”
“What do they want from us?”
“All we do is make a 15-second-long video and send it to them. They take care of the rest. They want it by 5 pm California time on February 8th.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah, that’s it. I told you it’s the greatest thing to ever happen to us. I’ve got a ton of ideas for the video. I wanna get a nice camera and lighting equipment. We can hire actors and make it amazing.”
“We better talk about it. Strategize,” Kent replied. “Let’s have a little founders’ meeting in the conference room.” Kent motioned toward the only place in the office with a closed door.
Some of the excitement drained from Rodrick’s face, but he followed his dad into the private space. Karen, the third founding partner, joined them. Inside the room sat a rectangular table. Kent took his usual spot at the head of the table, with Karen and Rodrick sitting on both sides.
“I don’t know why you’re not more excited,” Rodrick said to his dad.
“I am excited.”
“You should be jumping up and down, but instead all you can think of is how you’re going to take control.”
“That’s not true. I want us to take full advantage of this.” Kent looked toward Karen for support.
Kidzercize was incorporated as an equal partnership between Kent, Rodrick, and family friend, Karen. Their focus was childhood exercise to combat the obesity and inactivity epidemic. The kidzercise.com website included free lessons schoolteachers could use to get kids moving for as little as five minutes at a time. The heart of their business plan was an app charging a monthly fee. Users could play games that included fitness tasks like pushups, jumping jacks, and running in place. The goal was to get kids hooked on the free games at school and then have them beg their parents to play the subscription-based games at home.
Most of the company’s new ideas came from Rodrick. Kent provided the starting capital and business experience. Karen, who was closer in age to Kent than Rodrick, had a Ph.D. in childhood physical education. She gave the operation credibility and designed the exercise routines.
So far, things were going okay. More and more schools used their lessons and a healthy number of parents bought app subscriptions. The company had moved beyond mere survival mode and hired four full time employees in addition to freelance game programmers and web designers.
For Rodrick, growth never felt fast enough. He and Kent clashed daily about decisions and expenditures. They had bickered from the start. Rodrick chose the name Kidzercize and secured the web domain kidzercize.com. Kent hated that the name had so many Z’s and wanted something simple like fitkids. He did not care that the fitkids.com website was already claimed.
As Kent, Rodrick, and Karen huddled in their conference room discussing the Super Bowl, Kent continued to say, “I don’t want this thing backfiring on us. If we give them a bad commercial, we’ll never make another sale.”
“You worry too much,” Rodrick repeated. “It’s all good. No matter what, they’ll remember us. It’s all about name recognition.”
“Maybe we should pay someone to make it look professional.”
“I’m telling you, I got this,” Rodrick insisted. “It’ll have lots of action and jump cuts. I’ll make it look like the things kids see on TikTok and YouTube. I just need money for camera stuff.”
“How much?”
“Five thousand. Plus, I’ll want to hire people. Make it ten thousand.”
“That’s a lot for fifteen seconds.”
“The commercial time is worth millions. Ten thousand is nothing by comparison. We should spend whatever it takes to make it memorable.”
Kent turned to Karen. “What do you think? What would you put in a commercial?”
“We could film at schools and show kids exercising. People might like seeing that. Maybe we could add it to Rodrick’s action shots.”
“No, I need the whole fifteen seconds,” Rodrick argued.
“What if we tried a couple of things?” Kent said in a compromising tone. “Rodrick can make what he’s planning and Karen, you could make more of a school video. You could borrow one of the new employees to help.”
“So I can buy the cameras?” Rodrick asked.
“Okay, but let Karen use them too.”
Rodrick threw his plentiful creativity into the project and worried about little else for the next four weeks. After purchasing the perfect camera and lights, he studied sound and video editing. He planned to take the most popular styles on TikTok to the next level.
After recruiting some teenage actors, Rodrick and his small crew filmed daring skateboarding stunts, rock wall climbs, and swimming pool cannonballs. One of the teenagers had an uncle who was the songwriter for a band. He composed some high intensity drum and guitar music to match the frantic pace of Rodrick’s video clips.
Karen took a gentler approach. She called up friends at local schools and filmed lineups of smiling kids doing jumping jacks. Then she found smiling parents to endorse the Kidzercize app. Like Rodrick, she had a hard time cutting all her footage down to fifteen seconds.
A month seemed like a long time to produce such a short video, but the days flew by. Rodrick and Karen made changes up to the day of the TikTok deadline. On the morning of February 8th, the company founders again met in the conference room to decide which video to broadcast.
Rodrick showed his first. Even when viewed from ten feet away on a laptop screen, all the spastic action and hyper music made Kent dizzy. He instantly hated it, but only responded with, “Now let’s see Karen’s.”
Karen’s video combined sappy sweetness with strangely creepy shots of smiling kids. Rodrick did not hold back his criticism.
“Reminds me of a Soviet Union propaganda video. Did you get permission to use the kids’ images?”
“Not all of them,” Karen admitted.
“Then there’s no chance we can send that in. We don’t want to get sued. We have to use mine.”
Kent hesitated. “Maybe we should watch them both again.”
“I knew it! You’ve got a problem with my video, don’t you?” Rodrick snapped. “I knew this was going to happen.”
“I don’t want it doing more harm than good.”
An argument escalated. After ten heated minutes, Rodrick concluded by saying, “I’m leaving. You can do what you want. Either send in my video or waste the opportunity of a lifetime.” Then he stormed out of the office, confident that his father was trapped and would have to submit his fast-paced masterpiece.
Kent mentally struggled for the rest of the day. He did not want to hurt his son or discourage his creative energy, but he had a bad feeling about the video. If only Rodrick had kept it simple and made something less groundbreaking. All they needed was name recognition. Rodrick acted like he was a famous director attempting to rewrite advertising history.
The TikTok deadline quickly approached and Kent remained conflicted. With only a half hour to go, he got the strange urge to experiment with a very simple video. He opened PowerPoint on his laptop. He had little experience with design or animation, but he had used basic features in PowerPoint to liven up presentations.
Kent typed in kidzercize.com and changed the font and size until the letters looked appealing. Then he used PowerPoint’s animation features to make the letters grow larger, pulse, change colors, twirl around and float across the screen. He added some of the available free music as a soundtrack and watched the resulting video. Was he crazy or was it not half bad? It was a lot simpler than Rodrick’s. Less risky. It would not annoy anyone. With a few adjustments, it was exactly fifteen seconds long.
The clock ticked to the deadline. Kent shook his head at the no-win situation and then emailed the PowerPoint animation, which had taken him less than ten minutes to create. When Rodrick sent him a text asking if he submitted on time, Kent simply replied, “Yes.”
The people at TikTok did not question the content of the Kidzercize video. It certainly did not contain anything offensive. They shrugged their shoulders and pushed it forward to broadcast. It was set to appear after a promotional spot advertising how TikTok helps people and small businesses.
Kent’s extended family and all Kidzercize employees met at his house for a Super Bowl watch party. They stayed glued to the TV in the large room adjacent to the kitchen. Kent shrunk in quiet dread during every commercial break.
The TikTok spot aired after halftime. Rodrick, and nearly everyone else, anticipated fifteen seconds of loud jump cuts. The PowerPoint animation appeared instead.
“What was that?” Rodrick screamed.
“I made it,” Kent painfully admitted. “I thought it would be safer.”
“It was horrible! Everyone’s going to think we’re idiots. You ruined us!”
“I’m sorry. I screwed up. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Everyone who saw the video, and that was a lot of people, agreed with Rodrick. A good portion of Super Bowl viewers tuned in only for the commercials and they were harsh critics. Kidzercize was panned as the worst ad of the year and probably of all time. It set a new low in the history of advertising. It contained zero creativity. It was not so bad that it was good. It was all bad.
For days after the Super Bowl, people talked about the failure of the Kidzercize clip. That made them want to rewatch it for a good laugh. A good percentage of them visited kidzercize.com to see who could produce something so ridiculous.
The company had anticipated a surge in website traffic and upgraded their web hosting plan. They did not think big enough. They got so many visitors, the website struggled to keep up. And the curious continued to arrive. Some of them even bought app subscriptions – a remarkable number of app subscriptions.
Because Kent’s video was so iconically bad, it would be immortalized in every future discussion about TV commercials. Books would use it as an example. College lectures would show the clip. And the curious would continue to visit the website.
Rodrick tended to be the optimist in his family, but his prediction for revenue growth was well short. In the first year after the Super Bowl, Kidzercize sales increased by a factor of ten. And they bought their own building, with separate closed offices for Rodrick and Kent.
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