Yellow Tail Super Bowl ad ‘a national embarrassment’

Australians have reacted with dismay to an advertisement for Yellow Tail wine aired during Super Bowl Sunday which has been widely panned as a travesty against the nation.

‘Wanna pet my roo?’ a yellow-suited goon asks in Yellow Tails ’embarrassing’ Super Bowl LI ad

The 30-second advertisement, watched by approximately 100 million people worldwide during Super Bowl LI on Sunday 6 February, features a supposedly Australian man in a garish yellow suit, an unrealistic-looking kangaroo puppet at a barbecue, and a pathetic penis joke directed at a girl in a bikini.

The advertisement for the Australian wine mega-brand appears to be trying to communicate that Australians are laidback and know how to have fun, but judging from the vitriolic responses to it on Twitter, only served to enrage and mortify a continent’s worth of people.

To add insult to injury, it comes just days after President Donald Trump reportedly ‘yelled’ at Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull during a telephone conference and then effectively hung up on him – an incident reported in The Washington Post.

The Yellowtail Super Bowl ad humiliated my country more than Trump ever could.

— Steve Hind (@stevehind) February 6, 2017

‘Wanna pet my roo?’: Yellow Tail’s Super Bowl ad ‘humilates’ Australia https://t.co/v3xo7l79JQ

— Guardian Australia (@GuardianAus) February 6, 2017

OMFG, that Yellow Tail wine ad.

On behalf of Australia, we apologise.

— Peter Phelps MLC (@PeterPhelpsMLC) February 6, 2017

What hurt USA / Aussie relations more, Trump or that Yellowtail ad? Yikes.

— Bob Moczydlowsky (@bobmoz) February 6, 2017

The good news for Australians is that the advertisement wasn’t created by their own, but by the American Burns Group ad agency.

The ad was directed by Dutch-Norwegian director Harald Zwart, whose film credits include the teen feature Agent Cody Banks and the 2010 remake of The Karate Kid.