You can’t have a marketing blog without talking about what is essentially the biggest advertising event of the year, (insert booming, echoey voice here)…THE SUPER BOWL. There had been warnings that this year would be a low point in Super Bowl advertising but nobody said that using DVR during the commercial breaks would make me feel so grateful.
I was most irritated with the Budweiser commercials that insisted on using horses as their focal piece. I was equally unimpressed with the GoDaddy.com ads featuring scantily clad women. The horses playing football several years ago was commercial genious and a CG miracle. And the first gratuitous, half-naked women ad for GoDaddy.com flew in the face of conventional wisdom that says, “Hey, if you have nakedness, you must have a reason.” GoDaddy.com said, “Why?” And a serious of gratutiously naked commercials that were each crappier than the last was born. Let’s face it, beer, horses and beautiful women sound great but apparently you can have too much of a good thing. So, just to make sure you are clear on what naked women look like on TV, you can view one of the GoDaddy.com commercials here.
There were a few good ones. I always appreciate comedy in Super Bowl ads (and generally the game is a nail-biter so a little comic relief is nice) and sometimes a little whimsy works well too. I liked the Careerbuilder.com commercial featuring all the signs you may need to find a new job, funny but almost too repetitive for my tastes. The Troy Palamolu Coke Zero ad was a throwback to the Coca-Cola Mean Joe Green commercial but messing with a classic commercial can be wrought with landmines.
What I thought was interesting was the commercial that ranked the highest among viewers was a commercial written by regular guys who were sitting around eating chips and sitting on their couch. We discussed in our class a couple of weeks ago how marketers are becoming more creative in interacting with their clients and Doritos was an example in our lesson. The chip maker used crowdsourcing, which is essentially a wide net casting call to get people to do their work for them, by asking Doritos lovers to create a commercial. The winner, or in this case winners, would have their commercial aired during the Super Bowl and would also win a million dollars.
You can view some of the best commercials at www.superbowl-ads.com. It is sponsored by Hulu, which actually had a pretty good commercial that aired during the game and gives you a rundown of the best stuff. Hopefully, a stronger economy next year will make for better commercials but in the mean time, mediocrity rules.
