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The Advertising OlympicsThe best and worst commercials from the Summer Games.

By Josh LevinPosted Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008, at 4:11 PM ET

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Seth Stevenson named the most annoying ads in the universe. Josh Levin, Derek Thompson, and Chris Wilson measured the schmaltziness of NBC's Olympics coverage with the Slate Sap-o-Meter. Rachael Larimore suggested reading material for the Olympics. You can find a roundup of Slate's Olympics coverage here.

The Olympics aren't just the perfect sales platform for international stars like LeBron James. As this New York Times article points out, the Summer Games is the rare sporting event that isn't an exclusively male preserve. Nike, which has long courted women with its ad campaigns, is one of many companies using Beijing to reach female viewers. "We Have Softball," a collection of slo-mo action shots of amateur and Olympic athletes set to "The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA," serves as a sort of elegy for the sport and the American team—after four appearances in the Summer Games, softball has been excised from the 2012 program.

While the ad is beautifully filmed and edited—and grew more poignant on Thursday with the Americans' loss to Japan in the sport's final gold-medal game—it's not exactly subtle. The sneaker giant's market research must indicate that women cannot resist visual metaphor. Last year's big Nike Women campaign centered on athletes yelling stuff like "the half-pipe doesn't care that I'm a girl" into a giant megaphone. At the end of this summer's softball spot, a player smashes a bunch of trophies with her aluminum bat as the screen reads: "We have softball. You can have everything else." Take that, International Olympic Committee! A second Nike ad, "A Dream Deferred," is far more appealing. This spot, which sets a Sanya Richards training session to the words of the Langston Hughes poem, doesn't rely on over-the-top girl power rhetoric. It's a simple celebration of the toils of a world-class athlete, one who, like the U.S. softball team, didn't have the Olympics she was hoping for. (Yes, Richards' figure is juxtaposed with an image of a white dove, but let's ignore that.)

Nike's most-ubiquitous Olympics ad isn't designed to appeal to women.

"Courage"—an ultraquick-cutting montage set to the "I've got soul, but I'm not a soldier" refrain from the Killers' "All These Things That I've Done" that includes footage of Cristiano Ronaldo playing soccer, Maria Sharapova playing tennis, flowers blooming, a fetus, a pack of deer, the moon landing, a marionette, geishas, Lance Armstrong in bed ravaged by cancer, Lance Armstrong out of bed and winning the Tour de France, and a pack of bison—seems niche-marketed to stock footage archivists and amphetamine abusers. The only image in the minute-long commercial that lingers for more than a nanosecond is the closing shot of Oscar Pistorius, the runner with carbon-fiber legs who tried and failed to qualify for the Beijing Games.

That isn't the only Olympic spot to feature a handicapped athlete. A Home Depot ad that focuses on the Olympians who work for the company to help make ends meet—"I care about rowing so much that I spend my days helping middle-aged dudes find the right-sized wing nut!"—features four separate shots that linger on a Home Depot-employed high jumper's artificial leg. And then there's the Chevy Silverado ad that closes with a Paralympian in a racing wheelchair extolling the virtues of his truck.

What's bothersome about these ads is that they use wheelchairs and prostheses as a punctuation mark. You thought those regular old Olympians were inspirational, well, get a load of the guy with the artificial limb! Sure, the Paralympics is a fantastic event, but it strikes me as disingenuous for Nike, Chevrolet, et al. to use handicapped athletes as sentiment-generators when they're really angling for the humongous audiences that watch the Olympic Games. In 2004, no American broadcaster broadcast live from the Paralympic Games. No plans for live coverage have been announced for this year, either; a spokesman for NBC Sports says there "may be a limited amount of live and highlights coverage." The unintended message is that disabled athletes are inspirational enough for a one-second clip in a commercial but not worthy of carrying an entire broadcast. The athletes here become cheap signifiers of adversity conquered, an easy way to telegraph that your product is "inspirational." That sound familiar, NBC?