The Voices of Reason: Super Bowl Ads

The Voices of Reason: Super Bowl Ads
by Various Authors

Sometimes they're legendary for their impact, like Apple's "1984," which blew the audience away, never to be aired again. Sometimes they're legendary for other reasons, like E*Trade's first ad a few years back with the two old guys and the orangutan. In any case, Super Bowl Sunday has become for TV commercials what Halloween is for candy—an excuse to indulge in things one would normally never consume in quantities large enough to make one sick. Or at least a little giddy.

Question: What were the best and/or worst commercials from this year's Super Bowl?

Mike Daniels—I took my response to a new level and polled all of the people at my house on Super Sunday to help pick the best and worst commercials this year.

The best commercials always seem to be from the makers of beer. Once again, Anheuser Busch takes the prize with the top three commercials. For sentimental reasons, the young Clydesdale taking the reins for the first time ranks #1 for me. The two older horses pushing from behind and helping the little guy out was priceless. Right behind the top spot comes two Bud Light commercials offering comedy—the disappearing magic fridge and the beer stopping the grizzly bear in its tracks before being stolen by his buddy in a dead sprint.

The Fed Ex commercial with the cavemen ranks a close fourth on the list. In fact the best one-two punch of the day was this spot followed by the grizzly bear spot. That had us rolling through the first couple of plays in the next series.

Two of the worst commercials were the Burger King Whopperettes and the Gillette Fusion. Awful. The Whopperettes? Come on, who wants to watch dancing lettuce and tomatoes? And Gillette spending all that time on a razor ad? At first I thought I was getting ready to watch an Oakley
commercial as the circle that is created in the middle of the "fusion" is very similar to the Oakley symbol. What a letdown.

Dileep Rao—As was yelled out during our viewing of the Super Bowl (on 3 TVs, which was the greatest idea of all time), one theme kept coming up: nerdy financial companies with very hip and enthralling ads. I think the thing that makes me hopeful about advertising (which is, IMHO, in its essence terrifying) is that it might become more narrative and less 'ironic'. In the 1990's, ads turned from normal product photography and ad copy into ironic Gen X ditties about stupidity and slackerdom. Almost every ad still looks like that. Ads still use the same 'extreme' music that was dominant in the nineties, and it's horrifying.

This year at the Super Bowl, many of the ads were different and I appreciated that. The Magic Fridge was probably my favorite. I hated the women as burger commercial the most. There were some other ones that were okay. I hated the Hummer one.

Brenda McAlice—I feel unfulfilled by the Super Bowl commercials this year. There weren't any that really stuck out as being that great, and there were a lot of boring, forgettable and really crappy ones. Maybe I am just jaded that the Broncos blew it in the AFC Championship and it's clouding my ability to be objective. Anyway, worst by far, the GoDaddy.com ads. What the hell?!? You can't even tell what GoDaddy.com is selling/offering in the ads. Lame. Lame and irritating. The Escalade fashion show ad sucked, too.

Budweiser always puts a lot of money into the Super Bowl, and this year was no exception, but I can't give them the title of "best" because I work for Coors, so I've got to give it to Sprint. There were two good ads that particularly stood out. The first one was two guys in a golf club locker room seeing who has the better phone. One says his has criminal/theft protection, and then proceeds to use the phone as a weapon by throwing it at the other guy's head. The other commercial was a guy saying he has music in his phone for any event. His buddy gives him a few instances such as what music he has in his phone for his wife leaving him, etc..
Then the couch catches on fire, and the buddy throws that out as a question for what music to play, and the humor ensues. Random, and funny.

There was also one other one that I liked, but the rest of the world probably couldn't care less. The beer industry is losing share rapidly to wine and spirits, and the big beer companies have gotten together to form a group called The Beer Alliance. They did a spot on the toasting of beer glasses in several different languages, and the message was "cheers to beer," i.e. drink more beer. I like that one because if it works, it means I continue to get a paycheck.

Bob Jensen—I approached the problem of best and worst Super Bowl commercials with all the vigor and seriousness it deserves. So, immediately upon arrival at my Super Bowl party, I started drinking. My logic was that if I remembered something through a self-induced drunken haze, it would truly be memorable. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make. I don't remember much of the game, or the halftime show, so I believe my logic is sound. I do have a vague recollection of an animal being harmed while Dr. John played the piano, and then said animal being turned into a coat that Aretha wore while she sang, but that is not what we are here about.

I decided to separate the commercials into two categories, individual and group efforts, and rank them against each other. In the group category, easily the worst effort was put forth by Diet Pepsi. Jay Mohr is the agent for Diet Pepsi can? What? Do two commercials qualify as a series? Are there more? There really shouldn't be more, they were terrible. The best group effort has to go to Anheuser-Busch. While quantity does not substitute for quality, I believe that most (if not all) of their commercials were strong efforts. Not one of them was thebest, but they all seemed good. The members of my statistically relevant pool have mentioned several different Bud commercials as strong attesting to the diversity.

In the individual category, the very worst goes to the Diet Pepsi song. Wow—worst in group and individual, that is an epic poor performance by Diet Pepsi. My personal favorite individual effort was the Burger King commercial, for two reasons: 1) it started out appearing to be horrible, lowering my expectations, before finishing extremley strongly, and 2) as they were dropping the girls onto the huge hamburger, the hostess of my Super Bowl party screamed, "Look, a filet-o-fish!" It has been a long
time since I have laughed that hard.

A scientific poll of 1) the people at the party I went to, 2) adude I work with, and 3) some emails with my brother (look it up in any statistics book, that is a statisically relevant pool for polling) reveal that the going away favorite was the Fedex caveman commercial. Give it up to Burger King and Fedex who each invested in only one ad, but made it strong enough to leave an impression.

If the Monster drink truck had actually run over the Red Bull truck, it might have received honorable mention.

Martell—I always like the creative/funny commercials at the Super Bowl, even if they really aren't that creative or funny. I guess it's the effort that counts. Even though I'm not a fan of Budweiser or Bud Light, I tend to like those commercials, and this year was no different. I also enjoyed the two Ameriquest commercials and a few of the other "funny" ones as well (Aleve, Michelob Dark, Sprint).

But my favorite this year was the Motorola PEBL commercial. I like that I had no idea what product it was selling until the very end, yet the message of the ad was consistent with the product: the PEBL is the latest step in an evolutionary chain. Obviously the imagery stemmed from the product name, which made the name more memorable, but also the smoothness of the final product makes it out to be something I wanted to get ahold of, just to feel it in my hand. I think it was a very apt ad for a cellphone. Hummer took a similar approach, reinforcing their product positioning as part monster/part machine, but failed to achieve the level of overall affect that Motorola did.

To submit a topic for The Voices of Reason, or to be added to the VoR Shout Out List, send an e-mail to martell@babblog.com.