Super Bowl Ads

The Super Bowl represents the last watercooler moment for TV advertising. With the splintering of the media into a million different pieces across the airwaves, online, in games (video, that is) and everywhere else that will sell space to marketers, the Bowl is still a place where millions of young guys gather around their 70 inch plasmas and LCDs to share an entertainment experience. And advertisers know they have a chance to reach this precious demographic with gold old-fashioned TV commercials. Who can say TV advertsing is dead when an advertiser like Anheuser-Busch spends $25 million on Super Bowl commercials? Right? Right…?

And the agencies had better come up with the goods to prove that they can still woo the consumers with their fare.

Over the last 10 or 15 years the big lumbering agencies have become specialists in creating big lumbering TV-centric campaigns and are smarting from the blasphemy spoken by many with data to back it up that commercials are no longer reaching the people they need to reach, and those that they do reach, fast forward through them on TiVo or their cable operators own brand of DVR.

The Super Bowl is the agencies’ chance to prove that TV advertising can be great, that sponsored online search, branded entertainment, viral marketing and the like are no more than flashes in the pan and will crawol back from whence they came before too long.

But even this one last great advertising showcase - the Super Bowl - shows the case for TV comercials is far from proven. The advertising on display in the multiple breaks is not uninimously great. In fact, for the most part, the fare served up for the 41st Bowl was pretty damned poor given what’s at stake.

For one, there was an unhealthy a celebration of violence as a mode of humor. Not just slapstick, although there was plenty of that too, but people hitting each other or fighting or committing mass suicide. Isn’t the Super Bowl supposed to be a family show? I mean wasn’t that the problem with Janet Jackson’s nipple popping out a couple of years ago? But I guess violence is OK for young kids to see (my son is three and I had to turn the TV off when the ads came on) and to model their behavior on. Nice example Mad Ave.

And then there were the “consumer-generated ads” from Chevy, Doritos and the NFL. The Chevy one had a bunch of guys in the street taking their clothes of because they couldn’t resist the new Chevy car SUV hybrid thing in vile orange. It was lame. The Doritos one had a guy driving a car and a girl passerby smacking their heads because they were (a)distraced by Doritos, and (b)nerds. Lame AND violent. The NFL one was a great concept about the end of the season, poorly executed by the ad agency (and shot by commercial director legend Joe Pytca). But the idea actually came from an ad guy, Gino Bona, who works in a New England ad agency (Garrand Marketing Communications), just not from one working at Doritos agency of record, Omnicom Group’s Goodby Silverstein and Partners. Goodby must have hated having to produce an ad wriiten by a guy from another agency. Maybe that’s why they screwed it up. But, the point is, it ain’t really consumer-geberated if the consumer works in advertising. Right?

There was some great work, demonstating a good strategy and a big creative idea well-executed (and that, after all, is all advertising can hope to be), notably from E*trade, Revlon, Emerald Nuts and Toyota. They each showed that TV advertsing can still be a powerful way of getting a point about a product across.

But my award for the best commercials of the Bowl goes to Coca-Cola for two excellent ads from the “Welcome to the Coke Side of Life” campaign, created by Wieden and Kennedy. Coca-Cola has not been known for great ads in the past few years, producing a bunch of vapid, happy, slappy, crappy commercials that offended no-one and appealed to exactly the same number, but it really seems to have turned the corner with this work and I tip my caps to the marketer and its agency. W+K remain one of the great agencies around, developing stellar work consistently across their clients.

RSS 2.0 | Trackback