Outside of Indianapolis and New Orleans, most of the U.S. will have forgotten about Super Bowl XLIV by Monday evening. Across the US, 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.
The violent:
1. Snickers
2. The movie/video game trailers
3. Doritos
The sexually suggestive:
1. GoDaddy
2. CareerBuilder
3. Motorola
The heartstrings appeals:
1. Google
2. Coca-Cola
3. Budweiser
The traditional humor approach:
1. Pretty much everything else.
More takeaways and my 2010 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 a web site? GoDaddy.
- Guerilla search ads? Non-existent. Lots of cheap keywords out there like “little Kiss”, “mobile shuffle”, or “beer house.”
Here’s the catch about this entire post: I copied it almost exactly from a Super Bowl ad review I wrote in 2007. Because it doesn’t seem like much has changed since then…
The ads did suck on the whole.
They were unimaginative, poorly executed and some weren’t even original to the game. A few stick out in my mind…but they couldn’t possibly have justified the ROI.
Interestingly? We (Mullen) had more success over at http://brandbowl2010.com and #brandbowl. Granted we were being a bit snarky but at least we were integrated and using a more engaging medium then a static ad.
Telling: The Dockers site went down as soon as the commercial aired. Clearly no one thought about the web for most of these.
Generally agree. I happened to find the use of CBS announcers in the FloTV ads especially annoying.
Are there any numbers on how many people tried to call Barney from How I Met Your Mother?
The VW Punch Dub campaign has an interactive Facebook game (PunchDub The Game), a Twitter handle (@sluggypatterson), a blog (http://sluggy.posterous.com/), and a Youtube channel. They missed a big opportunity to better integrate.
I agree with your analysis – pretty underwhelming and not much has changed in 3 years. The real time reviews of commercials was fun, but a little too much fish bowl, in my opinion.