While likely hundreds of millions of people watched the Super Bowl this year, it’s unclear, exactly, how many times viewers had changed the channel — but there was one commercial that made everyone think they had.
Streaming service Tubi aired a commercial at Super Bowl LVII that looked like the Fox broadcast, complete with commentators Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen welcoming viewers back to the game.
Then, the screen turned to a streaming interface — in this case, free streamer Tubi. It clicked through a few options and then picked the 2005 comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
“No, you didn’t sit on the remote. But on Super Bowl Sunday, we fooled audiences into thinking they did,” the company wrote in its description for the commercial on YouTube.
Tubi’s spot won the Super Bowl’s day-after award for best commercial, called the Super Clio award, per The TODAY Show.
Tubi is a free streaming service with ads founded in 2014 by Farhad Massoudi that was looking for a way to introduce itself to the world amid high competition and a year that saw industry subscriber numbers drop and prices rise.
Netflix, a longtime proponent of its subscriber-only model, created a cheaper, ad-supported tier. Some streamers like Hulu, for example, raised prices in 2022. Peer Disney+ is shedding subscribers.
A 30-second spot at the Super Bowl reportedly starts at $7 million. The company took the opportunity, it said, to show off its style.
“The Tubi team came to us with a unique brief for the streaming sector: Reveal Tubi to the world, personality-first,” said Greg Hahn, co-founder and chief creative officer at Mischief, an advertising agency hired by Tubi for the project, per The Hollywood Reporter.
“These spots reveal a personality we’ve had fun creating over the past few months: quirky, playful, and a bit unexpected. Tubi is poised to be the troublemaker of the streaming world,” he added.
But the ad confounded the internet, generating who knows how many impressions online (despite Rihanna’s pregnant announcement briefly breaking Twitter).
Twitter had a field day with the ad:
That Tubi commercial came on & I yelled at every single person in this room.
— Joe Santagato (@JoeSantagato) February 13, 2023
That Tubi commercial had me looking at my dad like pic.twitter.com/9XAnZuqBXR
— RB (@rbhockey6) February 13, 202
Bruh that tubi Super Bowl commercial had these people trippin ??? pic.twitter.com/I6uUHBoj1t
— Shannonnn sharpes Burner (PARODY Account) (@shannonsharpeee) February 13, 2023
“Get off the remote!” one video joked.
