Super Bowl Commercial Trivia
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100 free Super Bowl Commercial trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
69 free Super Bowl commercial trivia questions with answers. This quiz is only about the ads. Not the game, not the halftime show, just the commercials that turned a football broadcast into the most expensive advertising night of the year. Fifty questions run from Xerox's monks and Master Lock's rifle in the 1970s through Apple's "1984", Mean Joe Greene, the Budweiser Frogs and the Bud Bowl, the dot-com bust, Doritos' fan-made spots, the E*Trade baby, Old Spice, Darth Vader in a Volkswagen ad and the QR code that crashed Coinbase. It is built for people who watch the game for the breaks: ad nerds, marketing students, and anyone who still says "Whassup?". You will need to know directors, agencies, prices per 30 seconds and which spots won the Ad Meter, so expect a mix of easy crowd-pleasers and genuinely hard ones. Every answer was verified against primary sources, mainly the Wikipedia articles on Super Bowl commercials and the individual ads, plus brand histories. If you want the on-field history instead, we have a separate Super Bowl quiz for that.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who directed Apple's dystopian "1984" commercial that introduced the Macintosh?
Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott shot the spot in England and recruited real British skinheads to play the pale, bald drones.
Q 02Which advertising agency created Apple's "1984" Macintosh spot?
Chiat/Day
Apple's board hated the finished film, and Chiat/Day quietly failed to resell the 60-second slot it had been told to unload.
Q 03Why did Apple's "1984" ad quietly air on an Idaho station on December 31, 1983?
To qualify for awards
To qualify for awards the ad had to air before the year ended, so the agency sent a tape to station KMVT in Twin Falls, whose operator had explicit orders to run it before midnight.
Q 04Apple's poorly received 1985 ad 'Lemmings' showed a line of blindfolded office workers doing what?
Walking off a cliff
Walking off a cliff struck viewers as an insult to the very customers Apple was courting, and the company stayed away from the game until 1999.
Q 05In Coca-Cola's "Hey Kid, Catch!" ad, what does "Mean Joe" Greene toss to the young fan?
His game-worn jersey
His game-worn jersey toss proved so popular that NBC commissioned a TV movie based on the commercial.
Q 06"Mean Joe" Greene, star of Coca-Cola's "Hey Kid, Catch!" ad, played for which NFL team?
Pittsburgh Steelers
The Pittsburgh Steelers lineman said the shoot took three days because he kept belching after downing bottle after bottle of Coke.
Q 07Coca-Cola's 'Hey Kid, Catch!' ad premiered in October 1979 during which broadcast?
Monday Night Football
Monday Night Football gave the ad its debut, but it became a phenomenon only when it ran again during the Super Bowl the following January.
Q 08Joe Greene reprised his famous Coke ad role in the 2012 parody "Stinky", made for which laundry brand?
Downy
Downy cast comic actress Amy Sedaris as the fan, who turns down Greene's famous gift because it smells.
Q 09The Budweiser Clydesdales were first shown to the public on April 7, 1933, to celebrate what?
The repeal of Prohibition
The repeal of Prohibition came with a surprise for the brewery's head: his son lured him outside with talk of a new car, and a hitch of Clydesdales was waiting instead.
Q 10Which dog breed traditionally rides on the wagon beside the driver of a Budweiser Clydesdale hitch?
Dalmatian
Dalmatian coach dogs once guarded the wagon and horses while the driver went inside to make deliveries, and they have ridden with the Budweiser hitch since the 1950s.
Q 11Which company has finished first in the annual Ad Meter poll more times than any other advertiser?
Anheuser-Busch
Anheuser-Busch won the poll every year from 1999 to 2008, a run that ended only when a fan-made snack ad took first place in 2009.
Q 12A 1996 study found children knew the Budweiser Frogs' slogan better than which cereal mascot's?
Tony the Tiger
Tony the Tiger's slogan was known to about half of the 9-to-11-year-olds surveyed and the frogs' to roughly three-quarters, a finding campaigners cited in arguing that beer advertising was reaching children.
Q 13Gore Verbinski, who directed the first Budweiser Frogs commercial, later made the first three films in which series?
Pirates of the Caribbean
Q 21In the tech firm EDS's 2000 Super Bowl ad, weathered cowboys drive a herd of which animals across the plains?
Cats
Cats, because the ad made the management cliche "like herding cats" literal, with ranchers who talk proudly of a family tradition of cat herding.
Q 22The 2014 Doritos contest winner "Time Machine" was reportedly produced on a budget of how much?
$300
$300 was the whole budget for the ad, in which a boy cons a man out of his Doritos by luring him into a homemade "time machine".
Q 23Doritos' 2014 fan-made ad contest winner earned a job on which Marvel film?
Avengers: Age of Ultron
Avengers: Age of Ultron was the job that came with the grand prize, which viewers awarded to Arizona filmmaker Ryan Andersen's ad by online vote.
Pirates of the Caribbean was still years away when Gore Verbinski shot the swamp spot, using lifelike puppet frogs rather than real ones.
Q 14In the later Budweiser swamp ads, jealous lizard Louie hired what animal as a hitman to kill the frogs?
A ferret
A ferret was the inept hitman, who tried to electrocute the frogs by dropping the bar's neon sign into the swamp, and failed.
Q 15Budweiser's "Whassup?" ads grew out of a short film Charles Stone III made with whom?
Childhood friends
His childhood friends from Philadelphia had greeted each other that way for years before he filmed them, and he went on to direct the Budweiser version for a Chicago agency.
Q 16The original 'Whassup?' cast reunited in 2008 to endorse which presidential candidate?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama got the endorsement in a two-minute sequel that Charles Stone III directed to show his critical view of the previous eight years.
Q 17The 1989 stop-motion Bud Bowl pitted Budweiser bottles against bottles of what?
Bud Light
Bud Light's bottles gave the ads a plot and an ending, which kept viewers guessing and even prompted some people to gamble on the outcome.
Q 18Eight hours of the Bud Bowl's stop-motion work produced roughly how much footage?
3 seconds
3 seconds was all that eight hours of work produced, because every bottle had to be moved by hand, a fraction at a time.
Q 19Budweiser skipped the 2021 Super Bowl, redirecting the ad money toward what cause?
COVID-19 vaccine awareness
COVID-19 vaccine awareness got the money instead, yet the brewer still bought four minutes of game time for its other beers.
Q 20The Herbert brothers' fan-made 2009 ad "Free Doritos" topped the Ad Meter, earning them a bonus of how much?
$1 million
$1 million was a bonus Frito-Lay had added that year for any fan-made ad that finished first, and the brothers from Batesville, Indiana were the first to collect it.
Q 24GoDaddy's first Super Bowl ad in 2005 parodied what recent event?
The halftime wardrobe malfunction
The halftime wardrobe malfunction of a year earlier was spoofed with a strap slipping at a mock hearing, setting a racy tone the company dropped only in 2013.
Q 25Which racing driver became the long-running face of GoDaddy's Super Bowl commercials?
Danica Patrick
Danica Patrick's 2009 spot "Enhancement" was the game's most-watched ad on TiVo, which counted live viewers plus those who rewound to see it again.
Q 26GoDaddy pulled its 2015 ad "Journey Home" amid complaints it trivialized what?
Puppy mills
Puppy mills were the complaint: the lost puppy gets home only to learn its owner has sold it through a website built with GoDaddy, and the company dropped the ad the day it was released.
Q 27E*Trade's long-running talking Super Bowl mascot, voiced by comedian Pete Holmes, is what?
A baby
A baby told viewers from the 2008 game on that if he could trade stocks online, so could they; E*Trade retired him in 2014 and brought him back for the 2022 Super Bowl.
Q 28E*Trade's 2000 Super Bowl ad, admitting "we just wasted 2 million bucks", had a monkey dancing to which song?
La Cucaracha
La Cucaracha played as the chimp danced off-beat in an E*Trade T-shirt, and the closing caption asked viewers what they were doing with their money.
Q 29At the 2000 game dubbed the "Dot-com Super Bowl", which company's ad starred its sock puppet mascot?
Pets.com
Pets.com spent millions on the spot, in which the puppet sang "If You Leave Me Now", and went out of business before the year was over.
Q 30In the 2010 Snickers ad with Betty White, which other elderly actor gets flattened at the end?
Abe Vigoda
Abe Vigoda's cameo closed a spot that topped the Ad Meter, and that May, after a Facebook campaign, Betty White hosted Saturday Night Live at 88.