Tubi Officially Wins The Award For The 2023 Super Bowl's Biggest WTF Moment
Super Bowl ads are often a bit off-the-wall. From SoBe Life Water's 2008 "Thriller" spot (featuring an unresponsive Naomi Campbell dancing to the Michael Jackson hit with an army of CGI lizards) to those horrendously obvious GoDaddy commercials, there's usually at least one advert during the big game that has you shifting a bit in your set.
During an evening headlined by quasi-sedated actors like Ben Stiller, Steve Martin, and Bradley Cooper shelling out for every brand from Pepsi to T-Mobile, as well as a few genuinely electrifying trailers for upcoming blockbusters like "The Flash" and "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" –- that awkward and unhinged energy was sorely missed. Where were our dancing lizards or our Betty White screaming about Snickers? As John Travolta worked his way through a sterile version of "Summer Nights," one might've wished for any brand to inject some insanity into the commercialistic parade. Then the fingers on the proverbial Monkey's Paw curled up, and Tubi entered the arena with "The Rabbit Hole."
For those unaware, Tubi is a major player in the quickly-emerging FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television) space. At the moment, they act as a purveyor of lesser-known content and a graveyard for prestige shows apparently not worth keeping on their home platforms (R.I.P. "Lovecraft Country," you deserved slightly better than this). It's worth explaining Tubi as a company upfront before we actually discuss their, frankly, incoherent Super Bowl ad spot, considering the ad itself does little in the way of explaining anything at all.
This is no Wonderland...
Tubi's Super Bowl ad is 60-full-seconds worth of unflinching nightmare fuel. The loose, hellish story depicts a proto-apocalypse wherein an army of giant demon bunnies sneak soundlessly into our homes, schools, and neighborhoods, drag us out by our limbs, and hurl us into dark, dirty, unending "rabbit holes" where we're surrounded by clips from equally dystopian television shows like "Westworld" and "The Masked Singer." Of all the things to be forced to witness during your purgatorial descent into madness, Rudy Giuliani's "Bad to the Bone" has to be the cruelest.
The final shot of this horrific sequence features the slogan: "FIND RABBIT HOLES YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE LOOKING FOR," which –- as far as slogans go –- almost stands out for its breathtaking combination of a shrugging sort of self-awareness and a complete absence of any promises of unique entertainment. In other words, it seems like an expensive route to introduce yourselves as "TikTok for Gen X-ers."
And with the rabbits quite literally pulling viewers unwillingly into inescapable pits of barely recognizable content, a bizarre sense of darkness pervades the entire ridiculous venture. It's hard to walk away with any other feeling than that Tubi wants to abduct users from their lives with banal yet unending media simply to keep them hooked as long as possible. If we're awarding points for honesty here, Tubi may have unleashed the greatest ad of the evening. However, as far as positive brand association goes, we'll have to wait and see how customers respond after suffering through ads for reruns of "Heartland."