The Super Bowl is an advertiser’s biggest opportunity to reach a massive audience. But at roughly $267,000 per second, brands rarely take any risks or depart from expected norms of humor, celebrity cameos, and dazzling visuals.
A handful, however, have used their time to deliver contentious messages—84 Lumber took on President Trump’s border wall in 2017, for example. And in 2010, Focus on the Family ran an ad in which Tim Tebow’s mother expressed her gratitude for carrying her pregnancy to term, referencing abortion without saying it.
But when it comes to making audiences squirm, few spots can compete with Nationwide Insurance’s 2015 “The Boy Who Couldn’t Grow Up”—better known by many as “the dead boy ad.” Over a decade later, it’s worth revisiting the fallout.
In the 30-second spot, a cute young boy laments all the rites of passage he’d never get to experience: learning to ride a bike, having his first kiss, traveling the world. It’s not until the end of the ad that the boy reveals why he missed out on so much: “I couldn’t grow up because I died in an accident,” he said, apparently from the grave.
It was a needle-scratch heard ’round the world, or at least among the 114 million people watching the game. The blowback was swift and widespread.
“Nationwide just ruined the Super Bowl,” actor John Francis Daley tweeted at the time. ESPN’s NFL Insider Dan Graziano wrote: “No one in the Nationwide advertising meeting put up their hand and went, ‘Let’s sleep on this?’”
ADWEEK sampled some of the online ire at the time, including one commenter who shared: “We’re Nationwide Insurance! EVERYONE DIES. Enjoy the game!”
Nationwide claimed it had sound reasons for the ad, even if the results didn’t translate.
As ADWEEK reported in 2014, when Matt Jauchius took the CMO job in 2010, he faced the task of competing with Aflac’s duck and Geico’s gecko. These competitors had proven that humor could sell insurance, but opting for an animal mascot (a “yuk and a hard laugh,” as Jauchius termed it) would have made Nationwide an also-ran.
