Outside of Indianapolis and Chicago, most of the U.S. will have forgotten who won Super Bowl XLI by Monday evening. Nationwide, most of the ads were forgotten by the time viewers fell asleep Sunday night.
Enough about how bad the ads were in general. [Along with the halftime show.] Many ads deserve their own special recognition and I’d like to highlight some of them here, by category.
Most violent:
1. King Pharma, BeatYourRisk.com
2. Bud Light, Fist Bump/Slaps
3. CareerBuilder.com, Promotion Island
Most use of sex:
1. GoDaddy
2. Chevy’s Consumer Generated Ad
3. Snickers, Chest Hair
Most emotional appeal:
1. Coke, Time Line
2. NFL, Brett Favre
3. Budweiser, Fake Dalmatian
Most use of facts:
1. Toyota, Tundra actual demonstrations (and an interesting contrast to their recent ads)
2. Revlon, Sheryl Crow on tour
3. Salesgenie.com (j/k)
More takeaways and my 2007 Super Bowl ad review:
- Consumer generated ads weren’t any better or worse than the "regular" ads. Ad agencies need not fear consumers taking over the world of 30-second spots – but that’s not what social computing is about…
- Integrated marketing didn’t show up, again. The only advertiser guaranteed to drive traffic to their site? GoDaddy. Biggest misses? FedEx uses another grey-on-white 1 second end-cap logo. Impossible vanity URLs like rocksolidretirement.com and snackstrongproductions.com. HP lists a vanity toll-free number (800-525-MYHP). I hope this is part of an A/B test…
- Guerilla search ads? Non-existent. Lots of cheap keywords out there like "map robot" for TomTom, "chest hair" for Philips, or "promotion island" for Monster…
And my favorite ads, purely by personal entertainment value:
- Coke, GTA. This ad was produced for cinema and launched in August 2006. Maybe not true machinima, but great that they used the same style.
- Garmin, Maposaurus. I’m not going out to buy a GPS, but I was laughing. (Then I said, WTF?)
- Budweiser, Shawn Carter + Don Shula. Love the 007 style.