Ads are special during Super Bowl, but not because they cost $3 million per 30 seconds or represent the best of the industry each year.
Instead, they seemed this year to be completely skewed to a slapstick, unsubtle, frat boy humor that best goes with beer and, well, football.
A pair of Bud Light ads promised that the watery stuff will help you breathe fire and fly, which doesn’t go all that well for two people with such powers (one sneezes and scorches a date’s cat; the other is sucked up in a jet engine – funny stuff!).
Bud Light buys the most ads during Super Bowls so their other ad extended the myth about guys who are such jerks they can’t go to a wine and cheese party with their undeserving dates without sneaking in light beer inside their cheese wheels (these are the same guys who went to the opera with six bottles of beer in their sportcoats – it’s a classy bunch).
The most offensive Bud Light ad from last year got a sequel of sorts as Carlos Mencia, whose shtick in these spots is to make fun of foreign accents, coached immigrants on pickup lines at the bar.
Another Bud sequel is the touching Clydesdale ad, this one which featured a horse and Dalmatian team that trained all year to the “Rocky” theme to be chosen as part of the team the following year.
Use of the word "suck" is cause for hilarity, Bud Light execs seem to think. So it was used as kicker in an add with Will Ferrell which cross promoted his upcoming movie, and in one that dredged up – get this for an original idea – cavemen trying to bring Bud Light to a party without having invented the wheel.
The Geico cavemen made a return trip too, if only to comment witheringly on the TV show that’s been so badly made from their ads.
In many of these ads, the way to communicate was to scream. Squirrels and all manner of woodland animals screamed in one Bridgestone tire ad; Richard Simmons screamed in another.
It was a stain that screamed on the shirt of a job applicant. An announcer kept yelling louder and louder during a horse race where Shaquille O’Neal was the unlikely jockey (it was an ad for … Vitamin Water, of course).
There were bodily threats against car dealers by wrestlers and witch doctors in a cars.com ad.
These are ads that were only about special effects. They’re supposed to make you say cool and that’s about it I guess. Otherwise there’s no reason why lizards dance to "Thriller" in a water ad; or have grass grow at the feet of Derek Jeter. The FedEx ad about the failures of carrier pigeons was unwieldy as the birds. Justin Timberlake was 'sucked" across town for not much of a reason in a Pepsi ad where "each sip gets you closer to Justin Timberlake" in terms of merchandise.
Old disco songs loom large in these ads for some reason. So in addition to the nod to Michael Jackson, Salt-N-Pepa played when a fat guy drank Amp energy drink affixed jumper cables to his nipples and started another car. Haddaway’s deathless "What is Love" played during an ad for a caffeine-enhanced Pepsi (such an old gambit that Chris Kattan, he of the original "Saturday Night Live" skit that employed that song, did a cameo urging them to stop.
Other celebrities: Carmen Electra in an ad for gum that didn’t make immediate sense (a guy got tackled by her body guards). Madonna got paid a ton apparently for having her imaged used in a Sunsilk shampoo ad along with Marilyn Monroe and Shakira. Charles Barkley in an overlong ad about him being in someone’s cell phone top 5 and talking too often.
Straining toward cleverness sapped some ads of meaning altogether. The grill in a bed instead of a horses head wasn’t such a clear signal. Nor was Napoleon with a GPS (so why was he driving a vintage car?).
These are ads where women are hot – all the Victoria’s Secret girl had to do is sit there in underwear and say the game was almost over. But what about a plain girl who is attracting a lot of men’s attention? It’s because she rubs peanuts over her skin, of course. Makes sense to me and will no doubt boost sales of Planters among the desperate.
On the other hand, what made a dude alluring to a city of people was the fact he carried a red Dell laptop, I guess (it wasn’t the Mick Jagger track playing).
Because these ads seem so aimed at single males, babies are treated as badly as women. They made one talk about e-trading by manipulating his mouth.
A couple of ads stood out because they went a different direction. Hyundai said its ads weren’t flashy or wouldn’t do well in reviews, but they got their counterintuitive point across -- its competitors will take notice of their new model.
Two Coke ads were about the best in a classic Super Bowl ad kind of way. In one, a pair of Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloons, Superdog Underdog and Stewie from "Family Guy" fight over an inflatable bottle of Coke, and an inflated Charlie Brown emerges to win it.
In the other, a bigger partisans James Carville and James Bill Frist find common ground around a Coke, and go on a tour of Washington together.
Doritos one with a couple of interactive experiments. In one, newcomer Kina Grannis got to sing her song "Message from you Heart," which was at least as good as Yael Naim’s "New Soul" (used in the ads for the new Mac laptop).
In the other, a viewer-made ad featured a guy who used a Dorito to lure a mouse to a mousetrap when a giant mouse bursts through the wall and begins to beat the hell out of him – in the kind of reckless violence big on the internet and Super Bowl ads.
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