Super Bowl, but what about the Super Ads?

I, like millons of other football fans, watched the 42nd Super Bowl. And like perhaps half of those viewers, I was horrified that the Patriots lost, swearing out Bill Belichick as the game slowly went downhill in the third quarter. Anyway, as I perused my aggregator earlier, I came across a post by Kevin Lim on his blog theory.isthereason that was about the Super Bowl. While this blog is intended to be about the Super Bowl ads, Kevin brought up a good point. Clearly both sides anticipate that they will win and produce all the appropriate merchandise. But after the game is over, what happens to the stuff made by the losing side? Well, according to Kevin’s blog, it goes to the needy in Africa. So for those of you Patriot fans who still refuse to believe that Belichick had them try to run a touch down instead of a fourth down field goal or that about four defenders somehow managed to not sackEli Manning, you can go to Mosamique and live the dream that the Pats won.

Anywho, I watch much of the Super Bowl almost every year, anxious of what cool new ads are being released. This year I did both, and in each instance I was elated and disappointed. For the game, it was great that the Pats were winning, then made a stellar comeback, before ultimately losing. For the ads, there were some hilarious ones, and there were some horrible ones. Writer Anne Lamott has an article about writing shitty first drafts (PDF); apparently some of the advertising agencies decided to hand in these drafts insead of the final copy. Some of the better ones included a Bud Light commercial where a guy breathes fire and burns down his date, her cat, and her house; Bridgestone features Alice Cooper (no, it wasn’t Ozzy Ozbourne; it was Alice Cooper) almost getting run over by a car; Shaq rides a donkey in a horse race to advertise Vitamin Water; a talking baby advertises for E*Trade; and some guy gets decked by body guards after offering Carmen Electra Ice Breakers’ newest mint. (More found here at WSJ.com) What makes these ads so great? Humor. Well, that and Carmen Electra. These weren’t the only good ones, but they stood out most in my mind. OK, that and the Victoria’s Secret ad; I can’t lie about that. I took a marketing class last year, and we learned that the best ads usually contain: humor, sex appeal, animals, or children (hopefully not all at once!). This year’s Super Bowl ads were a good measure of that.

But what made the bad ads bad? I didn’t get some of them, like a bunch of lizards dancing in an ad for Pepsi’s Sobe. It made no sense whatsoever, and it was no help that I didn’t know the actress who starred in it until after reading the WSJ article. Dell had an ad featuring their new laptop in which a guy gets “hit on” by people as he’s walking down the street; really, those people should have been literally hitting him for buying a Dell. Yes, I do have a major bias against Dell, but let me be forthright here in saying that if any other company except Dell made that ad, it would have been good. Pepsi had another ad that wasn’t so great: it featured Justin Timberlake and some bikini-clad women. The sex appeal may have won them some points, but it wasn’t that great of a concept, as Timberlake was being randomly thrown all over the place, and it wasn’t until the end that you realized why. I gave it bonus points, however, for Timberlake getting busted in the nuts by a mailbox poll several times.

Why did these ads fail? Well, for me they failed for a few reasons. Reason 1: the ad made no sense. I didn’t get the lizard ad so I didn’t like it. I’ve got to understand the ad to get the message. Reason 2: I didn’t like the product/company. Reason 3: it wasn’t put together well. The Pepsi/Timberlake ad had its sex appeal and a little humor, but it didn’t make much sense until the end.

What about the other ads not mentioned here? Visit wsj.com (for some of the best) or MySpace and decide for yourself. There were some other good ones, but a lot more bad ones.