Kanye West‘s Yeezy.com advertisement during Sunday night’s Super Bowl stunned viewers with its bizarre vibe. But then what happened next shocked the station execs who ran it and media buyers who approved the spot even more: West immediately flipped the website after the ad aired, replacing its previous content with just one item: A swastika T-shirt for sale, at $20 each.
Up until the ad actually ran, the Yeezy.com website featured a Shopify-powered store selection of various non-branded articles of clothing like shirts, pants and jackets — nothing that would have been deemed a content issue. And Variety can confirm — because this reporter immediately checked the site after the spot aired in Los Angeles — that when the ad first ran, the swastika T-shirt wasn’t there. Here’s an example of the before and after:
Within the hour of the ad airing in Los Angeles and other markets, West made the switch and users saw just that $20 white t-shirt with a swastika on it. At that point, the on-air ad had already run and it was too late.
According to insiders, the Yeezy.com ad went through legal approval, and moved forward because there was no standards issue with the 30-second spot itself. It’s simply a low-budget ad, shot on an iPhone, with West sitting in what appears to be a dentist’s chair while stammering, “So what’s up, guys, I spent, like all the money for the commercial on these new teeth. So once again, I had to shoot it on the iPhone. Um… um… go to yeezy.com.”
The ad ran on three Fox-owned stations, including KTTV Los Angeles, and may have been seen in a few more local markets. It’s not the first time West had purchased a local spot during the Super Bowl, as one was seen on at least one small market CBS affiliate in 2024. But that one aired without any incident.
There had been plenty of red flags that selling an ad to West might be a problem. The hip-hop star has proclaimed himself to be a nazi, and his X account has been deactivated after spending several days posting racist and antisemitic comments, from declaring “I’m a Nazi” to calling Hitler “so fresh.”
Despite those recent outbursts on social media, the Yeezy spot moved forward by perhaps falling a bit through the cracks since it was a one-off spot sold to a handful of local markets. Most of those ads are for local businesses like law firms and car dealerships (in LA, the ad that ran right after the Yeezy spot was for the California Lottery) — so if it’s not flagged for standards & practices, it winds up making its way to air.
As a result, West’s spot didn’t get the scrutiny that comes with big national Super Bowl buys. And since the ad didn’t include any questionable content, and at that moment the website didn’t include the swastika t-shirt, once it passed muster with legal it was likely thrown into the local ad rotation without much more thought or visibility.
“It was such a small ad, I don’t think anyone put two and two together,” said one insider. “The copy was clean, the website was clean, and so they did their due diligence with that little part of it.”
Reps for Fox TV Stations and for USIM — the ad agency that placed the Yeezy.com spot — did not respond to requests for comment.
Local ads in major markets during the Super Bowl might cost a few hundred thousand dollars for a spot — much less than the price tag for a national ad, but still expensive. Controversial advertisers often buy local spots, rather than national ones, during the Super Bowl to save money and also fly a bit under the radar.
Shopify also didn’t return a request for comment. Crisis PR vet Ronn Torossian said Shopify is making “a a colossal PR mistake by allowing Kanye to sell a swastika shirt on their platform.” The 5WPR founder/chairman added that “there is no excuse for Shopify allowing him to sell these on their platform and from a crisis PR perspective, this will have to be explained. Making money selling a shirt which was the primary emblem of the Nazis and signifies the death of 6 million Jews is despicable.”
