The WORST Super Bowl Advertisement of All-Time

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At Super Bowl XXXIII, an advertisement for Just for Feet aired that was so bad, that the ad prompted allegations of racism, sparked a $10 million lawsuit, and led to the company being destroyed almost overnight. This is the story behind the single worst Super Bowl commercial of all-time.

In 1999, the fast-growing shoe retailer Just for Feet decided to create an utterly racist commercial for the Super Bowl to tie into a contest where one lucky person who called in during the third quarter during the ad could win a Hummer. The ad depicted a group of white men in a Humvee hunting down a barefoot black runner in the Kenyan savanna, then giving him a cup of drugged water, and forcibly putting sneakers on him while he is unconscious note , followed by him waking up and screaming as he tries to get them off. Needless to say, it launched a major controversy, and was so bad that the company sued their ad agency for showing the ad at the Super Bowl and insisting that it would have a positive reception among the public, even though they had the chance to see the spot for themselves before allowing its broadcast. Even worse, the ad wound up showing during the fourth quarter, and the website and contest hotline weren't updated to deal with this fact, causing many to accuse the whole thing of being a scam. It led to the company becoming a pariah, despite having a great concept for their stores (and even then, the company was in a huge debt even before the infamous commercial was released, along with running a fraud scheme), and a year later they filed for bankruptcy and were bought out by the also-now-defunct Footstar. It landed the #1 spot on Cracked's 2014 article "The 5 Most Disastrous Marketing Failures of All Time", describing it as "creepy", "racist", and "insulting towards its own product".