Super Bowl Sunday offered a lot of entertainment on the field Sunday night. The commercials off the field, not so much. If you missed them, you can view them here.
There were a few interesting commercials, but overall the quality and freshness that Super Bowl ads usually provide didn’t add up to the glitz and glamor most of us have come to enjoy. The packaging of commercials seemed more like a promotion for NBC Television shows and their associated corporate entities.
The Winners:
- Pedigree – You can’t go wrong with animals, and their Adoption Drive campaign endears me to their brand.
- Doritos – I love that they ran another contest to give people nationwide the chance to shoot the Super Bowl ad. Everyone can dream of genie, but not everyone can throw a snow-globe at their boss. With the Wish upon a Snow-globe ad, crotch humor is alive and kicking.
- Coca-Cola – Coke’s vivid imagery was engaging and well received by the Super Bowl audience.
On the Fence:
- Hyundai – The Assurance campaign is winner in the sense it addressed the unemployment fear that is sweeping the nation. The campaign is a loser in the sense that it doesn’t do much for its brand and it wasn’t unveiled Sunday night as I’ve seen it many times before.
- Hulu – The counter-intuitive message didn’t make me want to go to Hulu and watch my stories. Why would you make a case that watching TV is not a good thing when your service is the vehicle to do just that? However, the Sponsorship of funneling viewers to Hulu in order to watch the Super Bowl Ads was extremely effective.
- Monster.com & CareerBuilder.com – First the good: Both Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com had funny and relatable ads. Now the bad: Neither commercial capitalized on what the people afraid of losing their job want to hear: Come here for new and plentiful job openings that will remove you from the unemployment lines.
The Losers:
- Pepsi Max – There is a lot of buzz around the Pepsi Max campaign, I just don’t think it did anything to make its target audience buy it’s product unless getting beat up makes you thirsty for a diet cola.
- Gatorade – Since ‘G’ already means so many things to me (think ‘money’ and ‘Warren’) it will never mean Gatorade to me. The whole ad was more about of a question of what? Who is wasting money on this ad?
- Sobe – Dancing around like last year’s ad isn’t new or effective way to sell what is otherwise a really good product.
What are your thoughts? Are there any ads you liked or disliked that deserve mentioning?