If you close your eyes and think about the early 2000s, you probably see a few things: low-rise jeans, Razr flip phones, and a chimpanzee in a business suit. Specifically, a chimp screaming into a telephone or firing a human employee. It was a weird era.
Honestly, the monkey super bowl commercial used to be the gold standard for high-stakes advertising. If you were a brand with $2 million to blow on a 30-second spot, you didn't hire a celebrity; you hired a primate. But have you noticed something? They’re gone. Aside from a few CGI cameos or fever-dream mashups, the "live ape" era of the big game has basically vanished into the abyss of marketing history.
Why? Because the story behind these ads is a mix of genius comedy, massive corporate risk, and a growing realization that "funny" doesn't always mean "ethical."
The $2 Million Waste: E*TRADE Changes the Game
The year was 2000. The dot-com bubble was about to burst, but nobody knew it yet. E*TRADE, then a scrappy online brokerage, decided to do something incredibly ballsy. They bought a Super Bowl spot and filled it with... nothing.
Well, not nothing. They put two guys in a garage, gave them a boombox, and sat a chimpanzee in a t-shirt between them. The monkey danced to "La Cucaracha" for thirty seconds. That was it. No sales pitch. No "buy stocks now." Just a dancing ape.
As the ad ended, text crawled across the screen: "Well, we just wasted two million bucks. What are you doing with your money?"
It was legendary. It was the ultimate "flex" of the internet age. It worked because it poked fun at the very idea of a monkey super bowl commercial being a cheap way to get attention. E*TRADE leaned into the cliché to prove they were different. Of course, they followed it up in 2001 with a "Monkey II" ad where the same chimp wandered through a ghost town of failed dot-coms. It was a dark, self-aware trilogy that defined an era.
CareerBuilder and the "Working with Monkeys" Fatigue
While E*TRADE used a monkey once to make a point, CareerBuilder built an entire empire out of them. Starting in 2005, they launched the "Working with Monkeys" campaign.
You remember these. It was always a lone, exhausted human trying to navigate an office populated entirely by chimps. The chimps were the coworkers from hell. They'd have "cake day" in the middle of a deadline, throw paper, or hit the "whoopee cushion" while you were trying to talk to the boss.
The message was simple: Is your job a circus? Find a new one on CareerBuilder. The numbers were staggering. After the 2005 ads, CareerBuilder saw a 50% jump in traffic within days. People loved them. Or, more accurately, people talked about them. They even launched "Monk-e-Mail," a site where you could send digital cards of talking monkeys to your friends. It was one of the first truly "viral" marketing campaigns, racking up over 160 million messages sent by 2011.
But by the time they revived the monkeys for the 2011 Super Bowl, something had shifted. The joke felt old. The "Monk-e-Mail 2.0" didn't hit the same way. The public was moving on, and so was the advertising industry’s moral compass.
The Dark Side of the Primate "Smile"
Here is something kinda depressing: when you see a chimpanzee "smiling" in an old commercial, it’s usually not happy.
Primatologists like Dr. Jane Goodall and organizations like PETA spent years shouting into the void about this. That wide-toothed grin is often a "fear grimace." Behind the scenes, the training of "actor" apes was frequently scrutinized.
A 2011 study published in PLOS ONE found that seeing chimpanzees in human-like situations (wearing clothes, in an office) actually made people less likely to donate to conservation. Why? Because the ads made them look like they were doing fine. It trivialized their status as an endangered species.
By the mid-2010s, major ad agencies like BBDO and McCann Erickson pledged to stop using great apes in their work. The monkey super bowl commercial didn't just die because it got boring; it died because it became a PR nightmare. Companies realized that "cute" wasn't worth the risk of being labeled as animal exploiters.
PuppyMonkeyBaby: The Fever Dream of 2016
Then came Mountain Dew. If the early 2000s were about "real" monkeys, 2016 was about a "horror-hallucination."
"PuppyMonkeyBaby."
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It was a pug's head, a monkey's torso, and a baby's legs. It licked a guy's face while chanting its own name. It was the most polarizing thing to hit the Super Bowl in a decade. People hated it. People loved it. It was weird for the sake of being weird.
This ad signaled a shift. Brands realized they didn't need a real animal to get that "monkey energy." They could use CGI or high-concept weirdness to grab the "Google Discover" crowd. It was effective, sure, but it was a far cry from the simplicity of a chimp in a lawn chair.
What Most People Get Wrong About the Trend
A lot of folks think these ads stopped because they were "too expensive." That's not it. A Super Bowl spot today costs upwards of $7 million, and brands are still spending it.
They stopped because the monkey super bowl commercial was a product of a specific cultural moment where we valued "shock and awe" over brand safety. Today, brands are terrified of a Twitter (X) cancellation. One video of a trainer being mean to a chimp on a set from 1999 could sink a multi-billion dollar corporation in 2026.
The shift moved toward:
- CGI Animals: Like the GEICO gecko or the CGI "Rocky" vs. "Apollo" fights.
- Human Absurdity: Using celebrities in "ape-like" goofy situations.
- Nostalgia: Bringing back old characters without the baggage of live animals.
Moving Toward "Better" Commercials
If you're a marketing student or just a fan of the big game, there’s a lesson here. High-impact advertising doesn't need to rely on the "cheap laugh" of a dressed-up animal. The E*TRADE monkey was brilliant because it was a meta-commentary on the waste of money, not just because it was an animal.
If you’re looking to track the evolution of these ads, here’s what you should do:
- Watch the "Monkey Trilogy" back-to-back. It’s a fascinating look at how E*TRADE reacted to the dot-com crash in real-time.
- Look for the "Easter Eggs." In recent Super Bowls, look at how often brands use "monkey" imagery or metaphors without using a real animal. It’s a subtle nod to the past.
- Check out the Center for Great Apes. That’s where many of the "actor" chimps from the CareerBuilder era actually retired. It's a way to see the real-life aftermath of the commercials we used to laugh at.
The era of the live monkey super bowl commercial is officially in the rearview mirror. It was loud, it was messy, and it was undeniably memorable—but maybe we’re all better off with the CGI version.