If the scantily clad wrestling bimbos in the new Miller Brewing Co. Lite commercial weren’t enough to convince you that crass is back with a vengeance on Madison Avenue, Super Bowl XXXVII should have clinched it for you.
Big and bold ruled the day as usual on Sunday. But much of it wallowed in the mud–and I’m not talking about PepsiCo’s Diet Pepsi “Mud People” spot, which was one of the few bright spots on a day that wasn’t one of the industry’s best.
Maybe Qualcomm called ahead and knew something the rest of us didn’t. The communications company sidestepped the ad show, despite the game being played in the stadium that bears its name.
Or maybe it’s just that Fox’s “Joe Millionaire” is demonstrating that it doesn’t take much to entertain the masses these days.
Despite bad ads and a lopsided victory, nearly 138 million viewers tuned in to the ABC telecast of the Tampa Bay-Oakland matchup and stayed through most of it, making the Buccaneers’ 48-21 victory over the Raiders the second-most-watched NFL title game in history.
The game grabbed a 40.7 national rating, good enough for a 1 percent increase from last year and the best since 2000.
Anheuser-Busch’s Clydesdales ad from Boston-based Hill, Holiday, spoofing the NFL’s instant replay with a zebra-as-referee, was the day’s gem.Too bad the Bud ad came right after kickoff. With few exceptions, it was downhill from there.
And the bad ads crossed industry and geography alike.
Detroit, for example, looked worse than Oakland quarterback Rich Gannon. It fumbled and stumbled, despite spending lavishly on talent, time and placement.
What we saw was an overrated singer, Celine Dion, singing in, of all places, her Chrysler Crossfire. “Drive & Love”? How about “Drive & Pain”?
We kept waiting for the windows to break, a la Memorex, or something. Anything.
Cadillac spent 90 seconds on a time-traveling ad that could have been boiled to 60 seconds or less and still included the key elements of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
Dodge was the worst offender, not once, but twice. Apparently demonstrating that the brakes do work, a driver saves a passenger choking on beef jerky by braking hard to dislodge the food. We then see the jerky hideously splatter on the inside windshield.
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Unlikely the target audience is old enough to drive.
The crude extended to the consumer-product category as well. Pfizer’s spot for Trident gum, demonstrating why the fifth dentist in the “four out of five dentists surveyed” said “no,” seemed to start out well. But it lost its potential when a squirrel crawled up the fifth dentist’s leg to bite him. The dentist screamed “No!”
We, of course, couldn’t see that coming.
That doesn’t mean there wasn’t the occasional hit. A-B scored laughs with its Bud Light spot from DDB Chicago that featured a man using a poodle to form dreadlocks to get into a bar.
Another home-run hitter, PepsiCo, scored with its Osbournes-turned-Osmonds Pepsi-Twist spot from BBDO, N.Y. We certainly didn’t miss Britney this year thinking young for Pepsi.
But two spots surprised, delighted and stood out. The humor was simple and actually said something about the product.
BBDO’s FedEx spoof on “Cast Away,” showed how a thoughtful spot can cleverly cut through the loudness of the day. A scraggily FedEx man, marooned on an island for five years, faithfully delivers a package he has held on to all that time. When he asks the woman what was in the package, she says not much, just a satellite phone, GPS locator, water purifier and a packet of seeds.
And the unexpected prize winner? Arnell Group’s Reebok spot introducing “office linebacker” Terry Tate, who clobbers office mates to get productivity up. We can’t wait for the next round.
So how did we stack up to the experts?
A panel of 19 hotshot creatives were asked to rank the Super Bowl ads by The One Club for Art & Copy and placed Budweiser’s Clydesdales spot at the top of the list. Other top ads in order: FedEx, Sony’s “Space Flight,” Monster.com’s “Driverless truck” and Gatorade’s ode to Michael Jordan, “23 vs. 39.”
The list’s worst: Cadillac, Levi’s cinematic spot (using stampeding bison) and Hanes, featuring Jordan and Jackie Chan.
The list of creative directors voting included David Baldwin, McKinney & Silver; Rick Boyko, Ogilvy & Mather; Lee Clow, TBWA Chiat/Day; David Lubars, Fallon Worldwide; and Woody Kay, Arnold Worldwide.
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Contact Jim at [email protected]