Weirdness Paid Off In A Big Way With Tubi's Super Bowl Commercials

When you turn on the Super Bowl, you're not only tuning in to the big game, but also the very expensive commercials that fill the void. I couldn't care less about the specifics of football (it's just not my thing), yet I always have fun sticking around to see how these companies spend 30 seconds for a $7 million timeslot. As with games of the past, this year's Super Bowl featured miniature trailers for upcoming releases such as "Scream VI," "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," and "Transformers: Rise of the Beasts." Given the wide world of entertainment, it would have been strange to not see streaming services getting eyes on their libraries.

Netflix partnered with Will Ferrell and GM for cross promotion, Paramount+ had "Tulsa King" star Sylvester Stallone pulling a "Cliffhanger" from a rocky mountain of his face, and Peacock spent their airtime showing how awesome Natasha Lyonne is in "Poker Face." They were all good for a cute chuckle, but nothing really stood out. I find that some of the most memorable Super Bowl promos tend to go off the rails. Maybe they even return later on in the game. For my money, Tubi (of all companies) blew away the competition in 2023.

Where some streaming services are cracking down on password sharing or yanking popular titles, it's no wonder Tubi stands out among the bunch. Thousands of television shows and movies are all made readily available at no charge, with the caveat of interrupted ads every 10 minutes or so — although that's a small price to pay for a service that allows media access to everyone with an internet connection. Surprisingly, Tubi ended up having some of the weirdest Super Bowl ads of 2023.

Its first promo starts out with folks just going about their day, unaware that their lives are about to turn in a creature feature. Out of nowhere come these giant rabbits who begin kidnapping folks. They get pretty rude, too, going so far as to hilariously kick a student out of his chair while he's studying. And it's not just one on one rabbit-nappings we're talking about. The furry Tubi henchmen have become a global menace, with rabbits yanking folks out of their cars en masse.

Rather than just showing these good people how to get the Tubi app on their television, the rabbits instead decide to chuck them down a bottomless hole. But there's no dark void here; instead, the unsuspecting viewers bear witness to thousands of screens with the kind of programs you'll only find on Tubi. I'm curious to see how long they can keep up their smile until they see the depths of what the service holds. 

The FAST (free ad-supported television) app was able to get creepy with their ad, while staying true to what they are. Tubi is the kind of streamer where you type "rabbit" into their search bar and you'll come across something cute like "The New Adventures of Peter Rabbit," followed by "Bunnyman Massacre" or "Serial Rabbit 5: The Epic Hunt." It's the wild west over there. You may find one thing you're interested in, and the next thing you know, you're questioning how deep the rabbit hole goes. That promo was weird, but Tubi wasn't done just yet.

There came a point in the broadcast last night where it looked like a commercial break was about to end and the game was about to return. But then it appeared like someone opened up the kind of menu screen you would see at the bottom of your smart TV. Audiences were suddenly transported to the Tubi menu interface, where an omniscient controller aimlessly scrolled through their titles for a few seconds before landing on "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." I was watching with a group of friends and can confirm that it momentarily caused chaos in the room as we were scrambling to find the remote.

It was a really funny way to not only cement how easy it is to access the streamer, but to cause chaos in households across the country. Social media has flooded with folks who found themselves and their families caught up in Tubi's clever sneak attack. Some Super Bowl promos are good enough for a quick laugh, but this is the kind of thing that people will be talking about the next day.

Tubi even threw in one more creepy ad as a bonus, following a gardener who hears a chomp. She gets up to see a massive carrot with a bite taken out of it, in addition to a mischievous rabbit lurking behind some trees. As the old marketing saying goes, "Always leave them terrified." (Note: That's not a real saying.) Given how much some streamers hold you hostage against the will of the mighty algorithm, it's actually kind of awesome to see a company like Tubi actually encourage exploration. You'd be hard-pressed to find any kind of impressive library of pre-1975 titles on Netflix, whereas Tubi will bring you to silent films, cheapo indie horror flicks, and the arrival of some fairly new releases from the Warner Bros. Discovery library.

Unfortunately, we all end up in the rabbit hole sooner or later.