Terry Tate: Office Linebacker
"You kill the joe, you make some mo'!" Reebok's Super Bowl surprise dropped a full-speed NFL linebacker into a beige office to flatten anyone with bad workplace etiquette, and cubicle America never laughed harder. It aired on national TV exactly once — then became one of the first true viral video franchises.
Terry Tate began life as a short film pilot by Rawson Marshall Thurber in 2000, before Peter Arnell and the Arnell Group developed the concept into a campaign for Reebok. Lester Speight starred as "Terrible" Terry Tate, an office linebacker brought into the fictional firm Felcher & Sons to boost productivity by delivering bone-rattling tackles to anyone who finished the coffee pot without brewing more or played solitaire on company time — each hit punctuated by gleeful trash talk.
The spot debuted at Super Bowl XXXVII in January 2003 and detonated. Despite airing only once on national television, the ad drove more than seven million downloads from Reebok's website — viral video before YouTube existed to host it. Reebok had quietly produced six webisodes between August and December 2002, releasing them online as the buzz built, and added a "Sensitivity Training" episode in 2004. The campaign's one famous flaw was that the joke overwhelmed the brand: in one online poll only 55% of respondents realized the ad was for Reebok at all.
The character never fully retired — Speight reprised Tate for election-season videos in 2008 and again in 2016 — and the campaign is a fixture of best-Super-Bowl-ads lists, remembered as the moment advertising discovered that the internet, not the broadcast, was where a commercial could really live.
Similar items
Reebok Pump
The shoe that made you pump yourself up—an inflatable basketball sneaker that arrived at $170 and instantly became a playground legend. Press the orange button on the tongue and air chambers swelled around your ankle; every kid in the shoe store pressed it whether their mom was buying or not.
Budweiser "Whassup?!"
Friends on the phone, watching the game, having a Bud — tongues out, "Whassaaaap!" Budweiser's campaign turned a real short film about real friends into the catchphrase that ate the year 2000, when every phone call, hallway, and sitcom in America did the bit.
Billy Mays
The black beard, the blue shirt and khakis, and the friendly bellow that opened every pitch: "Hi, Billy Mays here!" He was the face and voice of the entire As-Seen-On-TV universe — the man who made OxiClean a household word by sheer force of enthusiasm.
Budweiser Frogs
Three frogs on a swamp log, croaking one syllable each: "Bud." "Weis." "Er." That was the whole ad — and the entire country spent 1995 doing the impression. It didn't matter that most of the people quoting it weren't old enough to buy the product. That, it turned out, was the problem.