Letters to the Editor
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Was that Naomi Campbell?
I thought it was Riahnna Umbrella or whatever.
Also if you're going to rerun the music from prior commercials or from the 80's then don't waste your money on Super Bowl ads.
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Thrilled.
You know, it takes a sports guy to write so entertainingly about marketing. I've been reading plenty of commercial post-mortems but this is the best.
I really did like that reptilian thriller dance, but think of all the cool people they COULD have starred in it instead of a whatever-celebrity. As a somewhat sardonic yet easily-charmed female, my personal vote would have been Stephen Colbert.
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sad state of the Super Bowl ending
And the funny way that game ended!
You didn't see that one coming. It's over! No it's not! Go back out on the field to stand there like idiots for two seconds.
Refs out of control at the Super Bowl!
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Halftime even worse
They got Petty because Hall and Oates were booked and Huey Lewis said no.
Next year: Wham! reunion!
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Fun Fur Mouse Pummeling Yuppie
The Doritos ad with the giant mouse was pretty funny. Especially since the mouse was someone in a furry mouse costume, you could see his hair under the mouse head. No CGI. What's not to like about a dude in a fun-fur costume pummeling a yuppie?
The Naomi Campbell ad was a play on the video from the Cebu, Philippines prison where the inmates danced to Thriller. I think. Long way to go for something so lame.
You may remember last year's Salesgenie.com ad. It was totally low budget and lame but the company ponied up the money and made, like, double what they spent on the ad a week after the Superbowl. I think it was an ad that usually ran during daytime TV between Get Your Diploma and Personal Injury Lawyer commercials. Panda's are pretty stupid animals by the way, so maybe that was the joke.
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The Tom Squared show
One Tom tanked the other did ok for 12.5 minutes in front of a bunch of kids with glow sticks that have no idea who the hell he is. Those weren't real lighters, were they? What if one of those kids was a terrorist and had a real lighter?
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not only was the under armour ad a lame imitation
it also had really creepy nazi overtones!
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The megacorporations can't even make good ads any more.
They own all communications media vertically. Each one has a CEO that is angry and screaming for results. And what happens when you have a CEO running everything? Nobody thinks creatively. Everybody tries to please the CEO.
That's why the ads are so safe. That is also why the programs were so safe, before the writers went on strike. (The videos the writers and their actor friends are putting on YouTube are several orders of magnitude more funny and intelligent than the shows they were paid to write. That is, the shows they wrote before the CEO's decided that writers were a bunch of Jews they didn't have to pay, any more than Pharoah did.)
Those ads aren't written to talk to us, the peons. They're not even written for Madison Avenue, which would at least be interesting as in-jokes. They're written for the CEO's, who want to see that expensive CGI animation used because they paid for it, and who don't have any emotions or souls we peons might recognize as such.
By the way, why didn't Heather Havrilesky review these ads? Isn't that her department? Or didn't Salon trust her?
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Why is it...
...that no one talks about the Super Bowl ads on the radio broadcast?
I thought the Encino Jiffy Lube spot was a corker!
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Radio Spots
Chevy has a series of radio spots involving internet and text abbreviations (so 1990's, but then again, it's radio). They explain "LOL", even. The kicker is supposed to be that the Chevy has an acronym so it's cool like text, get it?
Then they said, and I wish I were making this up, "WTF: Wow, that's fantastic!"
My immediate take was, WTF?
Clearly someone in Chevy's and Westwood One's clearance department is so lame they had no idea something was being slipped past them.
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The Commercials Mirrored The Game
The game had exactly one moment - the Manning-Tyree play - where everyone jumped out of their seats. There was one surprise theme - the Giants getting to Brady - that you didn't see coming, but then it kept happening over and over until you kind of expected it. As for the commercials, there was one huge laugh - "Bud Light. Suck One." And then a couple of chuckles, which, as King points out, didn't evoke chuckles at all the second time.
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Coca-Cola Charlie Brown
I think the Coca-Cola Charlie Brown spot with all the giant balloons run amuck in the NY skyline was the best spot by far. Very imaginative camera angles, and a very surprise ending, plus it actually had some sports over-tones, the Coke bottle balloon was very much like the football that Chuck could never kick, but here he is rising out of 7th avenue to grab it away from the likes of Stewie and other bumping and floating characters.
Not unlike the best play of the game that had us all cheering for the Giants, this spot had us all out of our chairs cheering for Charlie Brown.
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Where's the funny?
I thought the commercials were pretty lame all around this year. Note to advertisers: People and/or animals screaming in various situations isn't as hilarious as you seem to think it is.
Terry Tate, rise from the grave and save us from this mediocrity.
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talking coffee stain
only ad worth a darn.
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Ads fail
I don't understand why these corporations spend 3 mil for 30 seconds and probably another 3 to 5 mil actually producing the spot and for the most part the ads don't mention the product and are only there to show either how clever the ad agency is or show how "cute" babies and animals are. Even the best commercials usually fail the client that spent 5 mil for brand awareness.
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were there
any political ads?
I don't get to see the much ballyhooed super bowl advertising (curses on canadian content regulations! curses!). I was thinking that it would've been an IDEAL time to run an ad for Super Tuesday...but I can't remember ever hearing about a political ad running during the super bowl. I seem to recall hearing about a MoveOn spot a few years back, but never a full-on "I am candidate x and I approve this message" type spot.
Are there regulations against those types of ads playing during the Super Bowl? Does anyone know?