The tech industry, like any, sees its fair share of negative reactions to marketing campaigns. The meteoric rise of electronic gadgets and streaming services over the last few decades has inspired countless novel, interesting commercials, and plenty that have fallen flat.
Some ads stand out for particularly negative reasons, as tech marketing can be awkward, terribly acted, overly intrusive, and occasionally, downright offensive. To their credit, some ineffective commercials are still entertaining, thanks to unintentional comedy or unabated silliness. And some apparently hackish ads end up surprisingly successful due to clever tricks.
But others are simply terrible. These are their stories, ordered to lessen the sting of the most painful.
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1 Robinhood: Born Investor
“We realize our gains” (and anger just about everyone)
Source: @superbowlcommercials5535 via YouTube
On Januray 28, during the 2021 Gamestop short squeeze, trading platform Robinhood halted transactions at a critical moment, to incredible backlash. Retail (often small-time) investors felt burned, and eviscerated Robinhood for betraying its namesake by stealing from the poor to feed the rich hedge funds.
Days later, Robinhood aired a 30-second ad during Super Bowl LV. Average by financial institution standards, the commercial’s platitudes and inspiring imagery included jogging up a hill and calmly banking while sipping coffee. The scorned grassroots users viewed its uplifting tone as something between the dog-in-a-flaming-house “This is fine” meme, and the coming of the antichrist.
In any other context, Robinhood’s $5.5 million ad wouldn’t garner a second thought. But waves of angry feedback, investigations including a congressional hearing, numerous lawsuits, and criticisms from otherwise vastly opposed political figures made one thing clear. Like the short squeeze’s once-in-a-generation nature, Robinhood’s feel-good commercial proved one of the most tone-deaf tech-related ads in recent memory.
2 Microsoft: YO! MS Raps
A terrible, timeless classic
Although technically an internal training video and not a commercial, this cringefest is too awful to ignore. It dropped in 1991, squarely within the Golden Age of hip-hop and a year after Windows 3.0, the graphical interface’s first successful version. It outlines important upgrades like support for mice and memory expansion for more complex programs, plus a comparatively refined graphical shell.
Microsoft produced various promo videos for internal and industry use, today retaining varying amounts of fame. This one’s a little more high-effort than most, as evidenced by the special effects scattered throughout, and less-than-terrible rhyme scheme. Somehow, this timeless classic failed to secure any nominations at the MTV Music Video Awards.
3 Apple: What’s a computer?
Get ready to roll your eyes
Source: Apple via Apple everyday (@appleeveryday4013) / YouTube
Right before the infamous question.
Apple’s misbegotten 2017 iPad Pro ad is the result of talented engineers turning clunky hardware and code into powerful, low-friction devices over decades. It’s both an interesting take on how we’ve integrated electronics, and a worrying look at complacency.
If that sounds outlandish, so does the fact that many young adults today don’t know what files and folders are. Instead of blaming “kids these days,” (I’m not that old), this points out how the work done to get electronics where they are today also removed the roadblocks that forced many to learn computing basics.
After an aesthetically pleasing 55 seconds of video, its climax invokes a brow-furrowing response of, “Oh, come on.” It’s unreasonable that an iPad-using teenager wouldn’t know what a computer is. But it’s plausible a kid wouldn’t know how to use a computer very effectively without a simplified touch interface. Just to clarify: it’s not the kids’ fault.
4 Internet Explorer 8: Oh my God! I’m gonna puke
But our research said you’d love projectile vomiting
Source: Microsoft via @puppet1991 / YouTube
We won’t link to this video or recommend you look it up yourself. The premise is simple: A woman borrows her husband’s laptop at the dinner table and discovers a browser history loaded with illicit adult material. The camera then focuses on her losing her lunch all over the floor.
It gets better (or worse): The husband walks back across the room, slips and falls squarely in the mess, which she continues making directly on him. An actor enters the frame and explains how Internet Explorer 8’s InPrivate could have prevented this atrocity.
It’s the first ad from Microsoft or any other major tech company I can think of that can accurately be described by the word
fetid
.
— Harry McCracker,
Technologizer, 2009
Safari and Chrome already supported private browsing at the time. Plus, extreme gross-out humor might not endear users to your product. Microsoft insisted that this — along with a few similarly sophomoric ads — was approved after feedback indicated most viewers would find it amusing. The campaign was such a miss that this particular installment was pulled after three weeks, just days after it was brought to widespread attention by national media.
5 Logitech Revue: Google TV
A terrible commercial done right
Source: Logitech via Eclectic Culture (@petegaller) / YouTube
Like a good dad joke, some ads are so inane they actually click. That’s the case with Logitech’s profile of an obsessed Kevin Bacon fan who’s depicted, naturally, by Kevin Bacon. Set in a home littered with Kevin Bacon artifacts, artwork, and even an endorsement for the president, the mock interview follows the superfan as he somewhat downplays a clearly unhealthy commitment.
The most self-aware moment comes just 20 seconds in, when the man shows off a painting of himself with the famed actor, while openly admitting, “I’ve never actually met him. I had it commissioned.” It aired well before the proliferation of streamlined smart TV interfaces, and the Logitech Revue media keyboard never really took off. In that light, this spot seems more effective a decade later as an ad for Kevin Bacon, rather than a tech product.
6 Coinbase: Less talk, more Bitcoin
Perspective is everything
Source: Coinbase via The World’s Best Ads (@theworldsbestads7917) / YouTube
Ugly and simplistic? Yes. Award-winning? Also yes.
From a viewer standpoint, Coinbase’s 2022 Super Bowl ad sports a legitimately amateur design. It consists of a color-changing QR code bouncing around a screen in classic “DVD Video” screensaver fashion, accompanied by the kind of synth tune you’d hear in the main menu of a late-90s futuristic shooter game. And that’s it.
While it wasn’t pretty, entertaining, or artistically creative, a big wrinkle turned it into one of the game’s most effective spots. Viewers who managed to capture the short-lived QR code were directed to the Coinbase app, and subsequently gifted $15 worth of the speculative pseudo-currency for signing up.
Released during one of the most fervent periods of crypto hype, it’s a good example of uninteresting, cryptic visuals coming full circle and actually bringing on new customers.
7 BBC Digital: Faces
Whatever happened to focus group testing?
Source: BBC via Adforum
A few of these unsettling, borderline cursed advertisements were considered lost media for some time, which was probably for the best.
Now readily available in various iterations, these short commercials start with a single, friendly face extolling digital media’s benefits. They quickly pan out to a Lovecraftian amalgamation of thousands of rendered, disembodied heads speaking in unison, and making up a larger, flying head, with countless more of these monsters in the sky nearby.
Unlike the dystopian home of The Matrix: Revolutions’ remarkably similar Deus Ex Machina, these flying aberrations are accompanied by sickeningly cheery music and wide-open, inspirational landscapes. Combining these subjects and settings almost seems to indicate that horrors beyond your wildest nightmares can even find you in the beautiful parts of the world.
8 Apple: Crush!
Words can’t do this justice
Source: Apple via YouTube
This disrespectful, easy-to-hate ad is unique among bad marketing. Quality rendering aside, its sole purpose is to say, “We can eliminate physical art, because we have digital approximations.”
It doesn’t just dismiss already existing tools — it annihilates them. There’s no wooden actor, cultural insult, tone-deaf characterization, or cheesy dialogue. There’s simply violence and destruction promoting a product. Even ignoring the slow, real deaths of IP integrity, creative opportunities, and media appreciation, it degrades anyone who’s used a brush, trumpet, turntable, or lighting rig to create fulfilling, hands-on art.
Our most recent inclusion, it dropped during the relatively caustic social media period of early 2024. A vocal set of online denizens have already helpfully explained how anyone upset by this repugnant display of arrogance is a pansy with no worthwhile perspective. Thanks, Apple.
9 Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer: Windows Then
Art from a true tech archon
You have to watch this one.
On a lighter note, there’s nothing like Steve Ballmer screaming into a camera, beaming excitement and flashing wads of bills. Long before head-banging on stage with Bill Gates, fist-pumping to Gloria Estefan, shouting “Developers!” 14 times straight, or excitedly rubbing neighbors’ knees courtside at Clippers games, he created this gem of a parody advertisement for Windows 1.0 (except in Nebraska).
This minute of unbridled enthusiasm encapsulates how Ballmer and his associates managed to vault the tech industry towards its current trajectory. Actually, the only reason this is really a bad commercial is that it wasn’t ever aired publicly in support of a product.
Poorly made or received marketing campaigns abound
These are far from the only ill-conceived or comically ineffective promos in the tech world. We’ve actually omitted some particularly inflammatory and controversial ads, partly because debate over them could stretch on for pages. And that’s to say nothing of the increasingly aggressive advertising tactics adopted by many of today’s leading corporations.
Ads exist for a reason, and in fact, trying to remove ads from the browsing experience entirely doesn’t always have the effects we expect. After decades of creativity, backlash, and subsequent refinement, it’s clear that marketing techniques are more complex and effective than ever, and hopefully will remain less gross, destructive, and offensive than before.
