In a little over three hours, Super Bowl commercials starred squirrels, beavers, chickens, longhorn cattle, horses, dogs, cats, hippos, giraffes, whales, cheetahs, tigers, snakes, and people pretending to be dolphins. Oh, and babies and kids. Also, men were made fun of for not being manly enough. There was a time when the Super Bowl was such a cultural zeitgeist that you went to school or work the next day and discussed the latest catch phrase. Who can forget the cool teacher in sixth grade referencing, "You Got the Right One Baby"? Or the cat drive commercial during the height of the Internet boom?
Now?
Now advertising executives give us animals or children. On Sunday it was my responsibility to assiduously study the commercials and bring you a countdown of the best and the worst. So that's what you're going to get. I'm counting down to the best commercial and alternating with the worst. The worst ads are in italics. Who got the best bang for their 2.8 million?
Read on.
10. The David Letterman, Jay Leno, Oprah Commercial
David Letterman, wearing a Colts jersey, opens by saying, "This is the worst Super Bowl party ever." Then as we pan back we first see Oprah, Letterman's erstwhile nemesis, followed by a further pan out to Jay Leno.
It's a promo ad for The Late Show with David Letterman and suggests that Oprah has brought both men together to mediate their differences.
Given all the backbiting between the hosts over the Conan imbroglio, the ad was likely an attempt by Leno to still show he has a sense of humor. Even though, you know, he doesn't. Granted, it was incredibly odd to appear in a promotional spot for his late night rival. But it was also so unexpected that it worked.
The Tim Tebow commercial fizzled. From the placement, right after Betty White gets tackled in a Snickers ad, to the tepid message, to Tebow tackling his own mother. Why in the world would Tebow tackle his mother? Because he's a football player? He was a quarterback.
What was all the fuss about?
This ad didn't actually endorse anything. Which makes you wonder, did Focus on the Family foment the outrage because they wanted to get their message out via the free media as opposed to via a television commercial that appeared to stand for nothing?
I think so.
9. Jim Nantz for Flo-TV
Is Jim Nantz becoming the Alec Baldwin of television sports? So well known for his iconic and serious delivery that he's now able to send himself up to perfection by doing that iconic and serious delivery in pursuit of a ridiculous storyline?
I think so.
He's already provided some racy commentary for How I Met Your Mother. As a newly-divorced man who is now free to hang his self-portrait wherever he would like, Nantz is poised for commercial success.
This ad wasn't anything amazing, basically a man was ridiculed for not being manly enough -- which was the most popular theme of the night after animals and babies are excluded -- but because it's Jim Nantz it works to perfection.
Having said that, it's awkward to pair Nantz with the games he's broadcasting. If I was CBS I'd seriously consider not allowing Nantz ads during Jim Nantz games.
Car ad fail: The Hangover is awesome! Let's steal the gag about a wild animal on a wild bachelor party and put a whale in an SUV.
People will love it!
Or they'll see it for what it was, a lame ripoff that falls flat. Stealing a tiger was funny in The Hangover because you knew the guys who had stolen the tiger.
Here?
Random guys are in a car with a whale.
What's worse, the ad cost $2.8 million and I can't even tell you which car company was represented.
8. Brett Favre's Hyundai 2020 MVP Ad
Another icon sending himself up. The gag is that Favre has won a holographic Super Bowl MVP trophy and is once more deciding whether or not to play a new season.
As part of his postgame interview Favre mocks his age, laments the fact that he is older than all the viewers, and basically shows that he has a sense of humor about the drama that surrounds the will-he-or-won't-he coverage of his football career.
The fact that this ad made the list shows how weak the contenders were. Basically, it was better than a human bridge for a beer truck.
How has Go Daddy triumphed by putting softcore porn, at best, on the internet?
Think about this for a minute, Go Daddy's commercials are awful and don't really do anything but direct you to their Web site, which, inevitably, crashes every year when people log on to watch the video.
But, really, why do people log on? For titillation value?
Please, you can find a billion videos online that are actually pornographic.
I don't understand why this works.
7. The Simpsons Coke Ad
Was this ad spectacular?
No.
The storyline suggested that Springfield billionaire Montgomery Burns was now penniless. But it married two cultural icons, Coke and the Simpsons, in a way that rarely happens today. All of The Simpsons' cast was involved and the ad strove for a cultural cachet that used to make Super Bowl ads memorable on the day after the big game.
As is, some Simpsons fans are doubtless upset at the creators for selling out, but I liked the welding of Americana.
KISS is endorsing Dr Pepper Cherry?
As if aging rockers had any coolness left after The Who's awful performance at halftime, now once-insane rockers are endorsing low-end sodas?
It makes you think Buddy Holly got lucky.
What's next, the surviving members of the Beatles for Diet Mountain Dew?
6. The Lost Spinoff Ad for Bud Light
A plane crashes on a deserted island. A Kate-esque figure emerges from the surf with a radio, but there is a competing discovery -- a full stash of Bud Light.
An island party ensues, no one wants to be rescued.
Given the timing, five days after the debut of the newest Lost episode, I thought this came off pretty well. For fans of the television show, it was a memorable satire of the recurring theme of the first several seasons: how do we get off the island.
For my money all we needed was to see a fat Hurley-esque character remark, "I'm finally going to lose weight!" and this would have been perfect. That or have a man in a wheelchair suddenly get out of the wheelchair and make his way to the Bud Light.
Anyway, I thought this one worked given the timing and the audience. But I thought it also would have worked OK even if you'd never seen Lost.
The Dorito dog collar ad involves my least favorite and least original Super Bowl ad theme: an animal meets an idiot.
Write this down, if you work in an advertising agency immediately kill any ideas that involve idiots or animals. It's time to get original.
5. Google's Ad
It was understated, classy and uncluttered, like the search engine. I don't think any commercial fit any product better than Google's ad. The Google search process is simple yet it leads us to all sorts of complicated information.
Put simply, life = difficult.
Google = making life less difficult.
McDonald's blew it with a take-off on their famous ad. The McDonald's credo: Let's go back to what was once an iconic commercial and make it worse by infusing it with new stars.
Remember when Larry Bird and Michael Jordan enthralled us with their game of H.O.R.S.E.? Well, this time new stars are playing a game of H.O.R.S.E.
Meet LeBron James and Dwight Howard.
Only, here's the deal, these guys are already superstars capable of amazing basketball moves, why use CGI to make them do even more impossible dunks? Wouldn't it have been better to let the cameras roll and see what dunk or shot attempts they actually came up with?
As is, they managed to take two stars and put them into a completely fake situation. What made the old commercial work was its veneer of originality in combination with a shootout contest.
McDonald's made an attempt to fuse the two generations by utilizing Larry Bird at the end, but it didn't work.
4. The Bud Light Book Club
The only three lines I remember from any commercial are both from this spot.
First, "I'd like to hear you read words."
Second, this sequence:
"So then do you like Little Women?"
"Yeah, I'm not too picky."
Somewhere Will Ferrell is kicking himself for not coming up with, "I'd like to hear you read words," in one of his movies. On a relatively weak night for beer commercials, this bit stood out.
The Clydesdale Horse ads are officially dead. This year's Super Bowl featured a baby Texas Longhorn racing alongside a horse. Then the Texas Longhorn grew up and burst through a fence so he could run alongside a Clydesdale.
For this, Budweiser paid in excess of $2.5 million.
This commercial was the equivalent of Phil Simms' haircut -- unoriginal and uninspiring. By the way, am I the only person that gets Boomer Esiason and Phil Simms confused? Are we sure they aren't the same person?
3. Megan Fox in Her Bathtub for Motorola
I loved this. A winking portrayal of the rapid-fire communication that ensues whenever a celebrity is caught in a compromising position. As quickly as Fox takes the picture -- "I wonder what would happen if I were to send this out?" -- it spreads across the country like wildfire.
Sparks literally fly in the next sequence. A man fails to hold on to the ladder of a friend, a wife slaps her husband, a gay man slaps his partner, and, in the raciest bit of any commercial, a woman bangs on a locked door -- "Jimmy, what are you doing?" -- in a veiled reference to masturbation.
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