Thank China for the Worst Super Bowl Ad

There were some good commercials during last night’s Super Bowl — I’ll say it. I enjoyed watching Arnold Schwarzenegger get roasted for his accent in his commercial for State Farm: “Like a good neighbah, State Farm is theah!” Cetaphil’s father-daughter commercial deserves a national honor (as does Taylor Swift’s capacity to draw daughters into their dad’s favorite pastime). The witness of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s long-standing friendship — as the former begrudgingly supports the latter’s “Dunkings” ambition — was a testament to local pride and brotherly love.

However, among the classic, kitschy American content landed a rotten apple: Temu.

The Chinese-owned online retailer — which seeks to compete with American giants like Amazon and Dollar General by selling cheap plastic junk for incredibly low prices — premiered a discomforting ad last night, “Shop Like a Billionaire.”

The foreign conglomerate’s Super Bowl commercial looked like an AI bot had been fed 100 hours of CoCoMelon, 50 hours of Wayfair ads, a crate of Polly Pocket toys, and some LSD for good measure.

A homemade jingle backs the advertisement, with the tinny, auto-tuned voice of an American pop star as modeled by a software program, proclaiming: “Ooh ooh, Temu! Ooh ooh, Temu! All of my wishes came true! Shop like a billionaire!” The track also features a chilling chorus of digitized children singing, “TEMU! . . . TEMU!” Their voices ring with an echo, as though from inside of a well or a shipping container.

To make things worse, Temu aired five ads last night — three during the game and two after the game. What was most jarring, however, was that it was the same ad each time. Unlike other companies, which aired separate ads in an episodic fashion (e.g., Pluto TV’s couch-potato-farm ads), Temu just kept blasting the same fluorescent garbage.

The cost of one 30-second ad during last night’s game approached $7 million. So one can estimate that the company spent around $35 million on air time alone — not to mention the $15 million in coupons and giveaways that Temu spewed forth.

A visit to the site feels like entering a game app designed for children — a spinning wheel of deals immediately pops up on the screen, enticing buyers with deals like “100% OFF For 3 items” if the user downloads the Temu app. Emojis and animations pop up across the site, where objects like a “portable electric cordless hand mixer” can be purchased for $12.98 and a “6-inch battery-powered mini chainsaw” for $16.78. The site is teeming with generic knock-offs of American brands, like KitchenAid mixers and Ring cameras.

The mega retailer also sells furniture, lingerie, microwaves, bed sheets, tambourines, liposuction machines, and just about everything else under the sun. Unsurprisingly, Temu scores low on quality assurance. The Better Business Bureau tracks consumer complaints, and Temu’s forum displays thousands of them — ranging from clothes that arrived with holes and stains to Temu’s withdrawing large quantities of money from a customer’s account without their consent.

Temu is owned by PDD, the group behind Chinese online shopping giant Pinduoduo (the Chinese Amazon). Pinduoduo is one of China’s most popular shopping apps, selling clothing, groceries, and just about any item imaginable to more than 750 million users a month.

The Pinduoduo app has come under scrutiny recently when researchers discovered its ability to bypass users’ cellphone security to monitor activities on other apps, check notifications, read private messages, and change settings. Once installed, the app is hard to remove.

(Is it just me, or is having millions of Americans download the Temu app on their devices a possible national-security concern?)

With regard to its business practices, Temu’s operation is shady, to say the least. A 2023 report issued by the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party offers a deep dive into Temu’s avoidance of tariffs, ties to the Chinese Communist Party, and forced labor of the Uyghur people.

For example, Temu is able to avoid customs scrutiny on shipments to the U.S. because of the de minimis provision of the Tariff Act of 1930, which exempts most packages worth less than $800 from being reviewed. In other words, even if Temu is shipping millions of dollars of materials to the U.S., it will be distributed among separate packages whose contents are valued at under $800 each. Temu thus largely escapes tariffs, providing a disproportionate benefit to the company, as they can sell their products for dirt cheap (the average price is $11) and ship them directly to consumers.

Temu and Shein (a similarly modeled Chinese retailer of fast fashion) are likely responsible for more than 30 percent of all packages shipped to the U.S. each day under the de minimis provision. Together, their output represents nearly half of such shipments to the U.S. that originate in China — or about 600,000 packages a day.

To top it all off, Temu almost certainly relies on the forced labor of the Uyghur people, as Temu does not ban third-party sellers on its marketplace from sourcing products tied to China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region. Additionally, the company does not conduct audits or ensure compliance with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

In sum, may I suggest, or plead — don’t buy stuff from Temu.

I agree with this guy:

America needs fewer plastic kitchen mixers and more F-22s.