Well that was an exciting Super Bowl yesterday though some might say it didn’t measure up to other years. Similarly, I thought the Super Bowl commercials were pretty good overall, though some might say this was a down year. As for me, my standards may have been irreversibly lowered after last year; from now on any year that doesn’t feature two guys kissing while eating a Snickers bar is at least in for an honorable mention. In fact, I thought this year had a number of solid entries that made it difficult to pick a single best commercial, so I broke them down by category: Those With Animals; Those With Celebrities; Those With Breasts; The Surreal; The Worst and an “Open” category for commercials that didn’t easily fall into one of the other categories but made me smile.
Those With Animals
Cute animals are always a good start and are deserving of their own category even though these could easily fall into the “Surreal” niche. For example, the Fedex commercial with the big pigeons for the “heavy stuff”. Ok, pigeons bigger than a bus get attention and the creators went just far enough with the gag with the scenes of chaos in the streets. Of course, Fedex isn’t in competition with gargantuan carrier pigeons so the strong product benefit message gets kind of lost. I also liked the Sobe “Thrillicious” commercial with the lizards mimicking Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. Great animation, loaded with little extra bits of business like a mini-fart cloud, but the commercial seemed to suggest that drinking Sobe turns you into a zombie, albeit one with rhythm. Better was the Budweiser Rocky commercial where an aspiring Clydesdale misses the cut to be on the Bud team but is taken under the paw of a Dalmatian coach (personal trainer?) who puts him through grueling exercises and training, turning him into a ripped “Italian Stallion” (they did use the Rocky theme). Somehow, though, I couldn’t help wondering if the horse was really on steroids, and if the Dalmatian gave him “the cream” or “the clear” since the Clydesdale’s head was nearly as big as Barry Bonds’. That was enough to tip the balance in favor of my favorite animal commercial, the Bridgestone tires “scream” commercial where a squirrel chasing an acorn into the road appears about to meet his maker (or KingDavid), but for the superior handling of the tires. Instead of squealing rubber we heard and saw the animatronic screams of the squirrel, owls, deer, the woman passenger…I don’t know, it just moved me.
Those With Celebrities
The only two celebrities I could remember off hand were Justin Timberlake for Pepsi and Will Ferrell for Bud Light. I don’t remember too much about either commercial since my mind always tries to block these two guys out when I see them, but I do remember they both seemed to be about “sucking one.”
Those With Breasts
I know, I know — it seems as if just about every commercial featured breasts in some way. The ones I selected, however, simply, um, stuck out. The first I’ll mention in this category was the CareerBuilder one where the poor working woman drone is so demoralized by her evil boss that her heart leaps out of her chest and through her shirt like a scene from Alien. Ok, it’s not really about breasts, but it struck me as a kind of “anti-breast” commentary on all the other commercials that fixate on womens’ chests. Or maybe the copywriter just needs a new job. The Victoria’s Secret commercial featured legs, breasts and music that I could actually hear because it also induced nearly absolute quiet in my living room filled with 20 people. A very awkward quiet. The best, or most over-the-top, breast commercial was the one with the chubby mechanic on a road call to jump start a woman’s car. He puts one end of the cables on her battery, then opens his coverall and attaches the other ends of the cables to his nipples, cues the ginormous sound machine in his truck and with a swig of AMP accomplishes the mission. The best part, however, was the “Do Not Attempt” message that stayed at the bottom of the screen throughout. Ya think?
The Surreal
This is the largest category as it appears advertisers are going farther and farther out there to make their ads to stand out. Sometimes this can be rather dark and even vaguely disturbing, such as the CareerBuilder ad with the Jiminy Cricket-type character being eaten by a spider, the Cars.com ads for extreme “Plan B” car negotiating that suggest having a head-shrinking witch doctor or a hulking wrestler in a circle of fire are acceptable ways of doing business, or the Doritos ad that suggests you shouldn’t tease or tempt a six-foot mouse. Bridgestone also appeared in this category when the driver of the car, on a dark, winding road, must suddenly steer around hazards such as a deer, Alice Cooper and Richard Simmons. You could feel the drama as the driver’s hands tightened on the wheel as he fought with himself over the urge to run Simmons down. Similarly the E-trade ads with the talking baby/day-trader had a way of arresting your attention in a kind of creepy way. The first ad featured the baby spitting up at the end, which isn’t a good idea when your audience is probably stuffing their faces. I was just about ready to write off the second one, where the baby talked about renting a clown with all the extra money he’d made with E-trade, when the kid looked at the clown then back to the audience and nearly took the words out of my mouth when he said, “I really underestimated the creepiness factor.”
Then there’s the silly-absurd ads like the ones from Bud Light that suggest their beer can give you powers like being able to breathe fire or fly. The one that nearly won this category in my household, however, was the Planter’s cashews ad where the ugly woman with the unibrow nevertheless had all the men around her completely smitten — all because she used cashews as perfume. The winner, however, was the commercial for Tide with the poor guy at a job interview (perhaps he got it through CareerBuilder) who is undone and shouted down by a large talking stain on his shirt. This one seemed to get the most and loudest laughs from our group.
“The Worst”
Where to begin? When you think of the amount of money that someone has to spend for a Super Bowl time slot, and then see the misbegotten effort the company puts forth, it strikes me as a bigger abuse of stockholder’s/investors money than Enron. It’s kind of like sending Travaris Jackson out as your Super Bowl quarterback. Among the worst this year was the Coke commercial featuring James McCarville and Bill Frist. McCarville’s face outdoes any clown’s in terms of creepiness factor, especially in High Def. Supposedly Coke won a bidding war for his services, topping the folks at Sobe who wanted to use him as one of their dancing lizards. Another flopper that went over with our crowd about as poorly as the announcement that we were out of chicken legs was the Parental Advisory ad with the drug dealer outside the quickie-mart complaining that he couldn’t make a living any more because kids were getting all the high they needed from their parents’ prescription drugs. Whatever. I kept expecting to see Jay and Silent Bob show up (once Bob got through over on the AMP commercial) to run the guy off their turf. Actually, what it made me want to do was run upstairs and hide the Lipitor — until I realized we don’t have any Lipitor. Speaking of drugs, the ad using a magical hand to wave a Zantac over a bloated woman to make her look better was just plain weird and wrong. Besides, I thought making women look better was beer’s job.
Another stunningly bad groaner was the Sisyphus ad for the Yukon Hybrid. Please, as if trying to sell people on the utility of a battery-powered half-ton SUV isn’t akin to pushing a boulder up a mountain anyway. Another car commercial made it into this category was for Audi, which was too bad because I kind of had high hopes for it at the beginning as they set up the scene like the infamous horse-head in the bed scene from The Godfather. Ultimately, what a waste of a premise as the “execution” left the commercial completely flat, almost as if the creative team’s heads had been cut off before the commercial was finished. Then there was the numbingly bad, even paralyzing, Gatorade commercial where a large dog drank loudly and messily from a water dish. That had a very high flinch factor as you kept wondering what it was about, and if you really even wanted to know. I remember feeling the same way watching Eraserhead 30 years ago, waiting for some pay-off or explanation. Then, and now, there wasn’t any.
But to get to the worst, however, you’ve got to have Go Daddy and Sales Genie slugging it out for a nice, dark wet spot at the bottom of the barrel. It truly galls me that I’m stuck with Go Daddy for my domain name following last year’s RegisterFly melt-down. There’s no effort to promote the benefits of their product (whatever it is), no offer to meet a need (except perhaps the most puerile), no product comparison. The ads aren’t even really saying “Look at me!” as they seem to be much more about looking at something else. At least the commercials inspire some emotion, even if it’s negative. The Sales Genie ads, however, are truly a waste of time and brain cells as I believe the animation, colors and dialog actually kill brains cells. With genius like this behind the company you really have to wonder how it ever became successful enough to make enough money to buy a Super Bowl ad, let alone two. Any future year without a Go Daddy or Sales Genie ad will automatically qualify as a “good” year for Super Bowl advertising.
Finally, there were some ads I liked that didn’t fit in any category other than they made me smile. The first ad, for Diet Pepsi Max almost fell into the “worst” category, however. First off, I can’t stand Joe Buck, so seeing him almost ruined it right off the bat except that he happened to be nodding off, which is what I do when I see/hear him so that was kind of funny. There were some other great clips in the ad of people nodding off before being revived with the product and going into a take-off of the old Saturday Night Live Night At the Roxbury skit. The commercial flirted with danger again as this skit is one of the most annoying skits in SNL history. Just as it was really starting to get on my nerves, however, the commercial ended with a guy snapping “Stop it!” to a couple of bobbing bimbos.
I also really liked the Bud Light ad with the guys being roped into a wine and cheese party with their girlfriends. What I like about these types of ads, while they focus on the guys’ obsession with beer, is that they at least portray the lads as being clever in the way they go about smuggling the beer into the party disguised as a block of cheese or a long baguette, or the way a TV is hidden in a box of Chablis. The clincher, though, was the pay-off line at the end where one the guys leaves the party “On a cheese run,” ranking right up there in my mind with “And a chain saw!” from last year’s Bud Light Super Bowl ad.
The warmest ad of the evening, however, was from Coke as it featured large cartoon character parade balloons of Underdog and Stewie from Family Guy breaking loose and competing with each other in slow balloon motion over an inflated bottle of Coke. It was funny, but especially satisfying when at the last moment a Charlie Brown balloon rose up out of nowhere to snag the prize. Yay! Charlie Brown finally wins!
By the way, if you missed any of these commercials, or want to see them again (even the bad ones) you can find a collection of all the ads from yesterday’s game in one place here.
