Superbowl XLI — Commercials

This morn­ing I had the plea­sure of sit­ting down with Nathan Baker from WKEF, Chan­nel 22, to talk about the com­mer­cials that aired dur­ing the Super­bowl last night. I must admit that last night was the first time I ever took notes dur­ing a foot­ball game. I sat with my fam­ily by my side, fever­ishly jot­ting notes on each and every spot so that I would be pre­pared for live telev­sion, where the poten­tial for dis­as­ter loomed large in my mind. Here are some of my thoughts on the big game.

Look­ing back over my notes this morn­ing I noticed that the words CBS Promo appeared way too many times. How many times do I need to know that CSI (all 3 of them) is on CBS. Oh yeah, there are also 5 other shows where they solve crimes in less than an hour. NCIS, Crim­i­nal Minds, Numb3rs, blah, blah… I don’t under­stand why the net­works don’t put the same value on cre­ativ­ity that the adver­tis­ers do. Bor­ing CBS com­mer­cial came one after another. Still, I will give them credit for the Let­ter­man / Oprah spot for the Late Show. It was laugh out loud funny. They should have put the same effort into pro­mot­ing their other shows.

As for the ads them­selves, I asked friends and fam­ily to email me their thoughts on the com­mer­cials fol­low­ing the game. I thought that a lit­tle unsci­en­tific polling data may help me to clar­ify my thoughts, and might uncover some inter­est­ing trends. This much I can tell you. There was no unan­i­mous favorite. Every­one I polled liked the Bud ads and had a few other favorites too. What was very clear was that every­one really dis­liked the Godaddy and Sales­Ge­nie spots.

Per­son­ally I loved the Coke par­ody of Grand Theft Auto. Visu­ally appeal­ing, good mes­sage, plenty of prod­uct expo­sure and a good twist. A home run in my book.  The Robert Goulet Emer­ald Nuts ad was another favorite, as was the Bud Light Rock Paper Scis­sors ad.  The KFed ad was funny, but I, and the rest of Amer­ica, had already seen it, talked about it, and heard the punch line long before it aired.  Jokes just are not quite as funny the 10^th time you hear them.  Next time around, they should keep KFed under wraps until the game, or cre­ate an alter­nate end­ing for the tele­vi­sion version.

Still, there was no one par­tic­u­lar ad that just blew me away.  Around the “water-cooler” there was a lot of talk, about how good a few ads were, how aver­age most were,  how bad sev­eral were, and how not one was truly great.  Much like the game itself, there were high­lights, low­lights, a lot of costly fum­bles, and in the end the favorite (Anheuser Busch) came out on top.

What were your favorites?

By the way the inter­view went very well. Thanks to Nathan Baker and 22 for mak­ing the expe­ri­ence so much fun. Thanks to all of my poll par­tic­i­pants too. Your feed­back was very help­ful, very diverse, and very funny.

YouTube — Broad­cast Yourself.