After weeks of hoopla, often insufferable hype surrounding the Super Bowl ads, and anticipation over which one would score the equivalent of Best Picture Oscar, I have to say that it was a lousy year for ads.
Don't take my word for it. You can, of course, watch many of the Super Bowl ads here or at any number of Web sites. Or, heaven help us, you can watch them as video-on-demand selections on Comcast (CMCSA) cable systems, or you can download them from iTunes onto a portable video player. There seemed to me to be more expectation this year than in past Super Bowls that the ads would be so wonderful that viewers would want to replay them over and over as if they were an Eminem video or a Brad Pitt tell-all about who's better in the sack -- Angelina or Jennifer.
Frankly, I don't think they rose to the hype. A handful rang the bell as very good ads, though surely not super. And none met my standards for being worthy of entertainment "programming" that I would watch without a Super Bowl game wrapped around them.
THE ART OF OOPS. The two best ads, if I have to name a winner, come from the same advertiser -- Ameriquest. The mortgage lender, a newcomer to the Super Bowl last year, is proving to be a reliable source of fun and humor, more so even than Super Bowl stalwarts Pepsi (PEP) and Budweiser (BUD).
In Ameriquest's first-half ad, a doctor and medical technician, who's poised with a defibrillator, stand over a patient in his hospital bed. A fly buzzes around the tech, and he gives in to the temptation to use his defibrillator paddle as a bug zapper. The dead fly hits the patient's chest. As the man's wife and daughter enter the hospital room, the buggy technician says, "That killed him." The tagline kicks in, "Don't Judge Too Quickly. We won't."
If Ameriquest had a steadier ad schedule throughout the year, it could, with ads like these, become the Geico of mortgage lending. It's hard to do black humor well, but Ameriquest pulled it off. Its second, just as good, features a woman trying to wriggle out of her airplane seat during a red-eye flight. The plane hits turbulence, she loses her balance, and winds up sitting on a unsuspecting guy's lap, spread eagle with her dress hiked up around her hips. The same tagline sends the point home.
"A LITTLE MONSTER." A close runner up to Ameriquest was General Motor's (GM) Hummer. In a great example of good storytelling in an ad, Hummer told a yarn about a Godzilla-like monster meeting up with a giant robot that resembled R2D2 from Star Wars. As both stand above a terrorized city, the two are immediately drawn to one another, court, canoodle -- and the big lizard is soon with child. She gives birth (we don't see this part, thank goodness) to a Hummer H3 SUV. The on-screen copy simply says, "H3. It's a little monster."
This ad was a excellent, especially in contrast to GM's other ad, a special-effects exercise in the name of the new Cadillac Escalade SUV (one of which went to the game's MVP, Pittsburgh wide receiver Hines Ward) depicting a fashion show in which all the models are dripping with chrome. Yawn. Maybe it looked better on HDTV and a giant plasma screen. It was a snooze on my set.
The Top Tier of a Mediocre Bunch An ad for Mobile ESPN made it into this list for its brilliant art direction. A man, glued to his cell-phone screen as he walks down the street, is surrounded by a quick succession of athletes and game situations -- football, gymnastics, baseball, tennis, every sport you could think of. "Welcome to Sports Heaven" is the tagline. The beauty of the ad is in the cinematography that made me want to see how good watching sports on a tiny screen could be.
This year's crop was so lousy that I have to include the promos for Desperate Housewives in my list for the game's best. The first of these ads was the best, and surprising. Shaquille O'Neal is at the foul line ready to take a shot. Is this ad for McDonald's? Pepsi? Nope. Shaq looks over his shoulder and says, with a tearful sniff, "I'm so sorry Gaby lost her baby." Later on, we see a longer version of the ad with Sugar Ray Leonard, Hugh Hefner, and other recognizables chatting plot lines from the hit ABC show. The Shaq moment makes the ad.
One Bud Light ad was pretty good, but considering that Anheuser bought 10 spots, one "pretty good" is a bad batting average. In this ad, a young man thinks he has outsmarted his party guests by installing a revolving wall in his apartment that will conceal his fridge full of beer when he wants. On the other side of the wall, though, is a gaggle of young slackers who are worshiping "the magic fridge" full of beer, which mysteriously appears in their apartment. At least I snickered.
In a nod to simple humor sometimes being the best way to make a point, Sierra Mist scored with a very nice ad featuring annoying comedienne Kathy Griffin as an airport security screener who makes a beeping sound with her mouth when she scans a passenger's bottle of Sierra Mist. Her screener-mate backs her up, of course, and the passenger is forced to hand over his Sierra Mist in order to move on or endure a delay as he's stripped-searched.
Anheuser-Busch is good for at least one poignant ad featuring the Clydesdales. I liked this year's colt, which slipped into a harness and began to nudge a seemingly too-big-for-him Bud beer wagon. As the little guy tugs it forward, the camera shot widens, and we see two full-grown Clydesdales pushing it from behind. The wagonmaster says, "I won't tell if you won't tell." This ad, of course, is helped by how damn cute the colt is.
And now for a few other categories:
The Enough Already Award Bawdy Internet services company godaddy.com ran some schlock in which a buxom brunette's tank top is coming undone thread by thread until it snaps off in an apparent wardrobe malfunction, prompting an aged network censor to reach for an oxygen mask. Me too. Give me a break.
The Why Did You Leave Your Best Stuff at Home AwardBurger King has been running a series of highly entertaining, wonderfully executed ads aimed at the football fan for the last several weeks. In these spots, the Burger King character, through the art of special effects and in all his campiness, is seen carrying the ball in a real game, whooping it up on the sidelines with former Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula, and another ad in which the King is superimposed over real footage of Steve Young's legendary 49-yard scramble in the 1988 NFC Divisional Playoffs against the Minnesota Vikings.
Why in heaven's name agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky chose a weird and disappointing Busby Berkeley-style musical number featuring anthropomorphized Burger King ingredients is beyond me.
The Newcomer Learns the Hard Way Award Nationwide Insurance got sucked in to spending the big money on the big name and chose male model and Harlequin romance-novel cover-boy Fabio for its Super Bowl debut. The ad, featuring Fabio paddling a pretty young damsel in a Venetian gondola, is supposed to show that life goes by quickly. The point is clumsily made as Fabio turns into an old man who he didn't prepare for his future. The crux of the campaign is that your life can change in a moment, and you have to be prepared. I'll be a careerbuilder.com monkey's uncle if many people remember this as a Nationwide ad rather than "the Fabio ad."
The "A" for Effort Award Dove has been running a much publicized "Real Women" campaign that strives to elevate the status of women who aren't buxom, blonde, and below size 6. The Super Bowl ad is a very well executed 45-second piece that just missed making my top tier of runners-up. It features girls between the ages of 6 and 16 from different ethnic backgrounds.
Subtitles tell us what each is thinking: One says she's afraid she's fat. Another wishes she were blonde. A third hates her freckles. Soaring behind the portraits is the Girl Scouts chorus of Nassau County, New York, singing the Cindi Lauper song, True Colors. Unilever, which markets Dove, and agency Ogilvy & Mather not only deserve credit for a very well-turned-out ad but for running it on the Super Bowl against ads featuring Jessica Simpson boobing it up for Pizza Hut and other frat-boy ads elevating their relationships with beer over those they have with women.
The C'mon and Try a Little Harder Award Federal Express (FDX) has been known for some terrific ads on and off the Super Bowl, but the overnight carrier left it's a-game home. An ad that depicts a couple of cavemen left me cold. One caveman straps a staff he's mailing to someone onto the leg of a flying dinosaur. It takes off and immediately gets eaten by another dinosaur. The second caveman chides him for not using FedEx, which the first cavemen reminds him doesn't exist yet. As the unlucky sender leaves the cave after being fired, he gets stomped to death by a mastodon. Nyuck, nyuck. Not!
Kiley is BusinessWeek's Marketing editor in New York
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