Super Bowl commercials: The good & the bad
I missed the Super Bowl commercials last year for the best of reasons. I was at the Super Bowl.
This year, I was home, which means access to the Super Bowl commercials. And I’ve got to say, it was a stellar class. There were some goofball advertisements, but for the most part, imaginative and entertaining.
Here’s my top 10 commercials from Sunday night:
1. Coca-Cola’s polar bears. Three versions, all fun. First off, polar bears are totally cool. If you’ve never seen polar bears, check them out sometime. I’ve seen them at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. A huge water tank, and let me tell you, they aren’t moving slowly when they hit that water. Anyway, the polar bears were great. And I love the imagery of an ice-cold Coke in arctic conditions.
2. Elton John’s Pepsi commercial. Pop culture meets the French Revolution. The X Factor’s Melanie Amaro the heroine. Fun, fun, fun.
3. Budweiser’s Prohibition spot. Celebrating the end of Prohibition, complete with the guy coming out of the barber shop with shaving cream all over his face. Just a bunch of cool-looking scenes from the 1930s, including a baseball park.
4. MetLife’s cartoon characters. All your old favorites made an appearance. The Jetsons. Mister Magoo. Charlie Brown, Underdog, the Cosby Kids. I was ready to sign up for insurance on the spot.
5. Doritos’ Great Dane. The dog apparently kills a cat and uses a bag of Doritos to bribe his owner not to say anything. Apparently, a bunch of cat-lovers are outraged, and you can see their point. But I must admit, I laughed out loud. Maybe if it wasn’t a Great Dane, I wouldn’t be so charmed.
6. Volkswagen’s dog workout. Some collie (looks like a collie) wants to chase cars, but he’s too fat to get through the doggy door. So he goes on a weight-loss training regimen. Climbs stairs, pulls a mat with weights on it, runs laps, watches what it eats, looks at itself in the mirror. A wonderful commentary on modern America. Not that it made me want to buy a Volkswagen.
7. Hyundai’s Rocky theme. Hyundai didn’t have a pristine night. The commercial where a driver uses quick stops and starts to resuscitate his passenger? Not all that cute. And the spot where a guy lets a cheetah out of a cage to race a Hyundai was just so-so. But when all the Hyundai employees start humming the theme from Rocky, well, I’m a sucker for the Rocky theme, and I’ll bet most Americans are, too.
8. The naked M&M’s. Sort of silly. But it made you think of M&M’s. And how can that be a bad thing?
9. Best Buy’s mobile phone store. Best Buy introduces us to all the guys who made great inventions with cell phones. Texting, videoing, all kinds of stuff. I found it educational.
10. Chevy Camaro and the graduate. Some guy thinks his parents have given him a Camaro for graduation and goes coo-coo. It’s actually the neighbor’s new car. A classic case of letting some misinformation go on too long.
Some general thoughts about other commercials.
* Didn’t like Audi’s vampire party. I don’t like vampires. I guess 16-year-old girls do, but I’m not sure they buy a bunch of Audis.
* The Ronald McDonald House commercial was sweet and darn near perfect. I don’t know why I didn’t put it in the top 10. Just didn’t seem like it belonged on the list.
* I didn’t like Chevrolet’s end-of-the-world commercial. The world has ended by some kind of The Apocalypse, and the only survivors drive Chevy trucks. Then the ad takes a shot at Ford owners. Sorry, I don’t want to live in a world where everyone drives a Chevy truck.
* Is it just me, or has Jerry Seinfeld lost his touch? His Acura commercial, in which he tries to buy the first Acura and must bribe a customer to step aside, just doesn’t do it. Not even Jay Leno rescues the commercial.
* The monkeys with careerbuilder.com make me laugh. They don’t make me check out careerbuilder.com, but they make me laugh.
* “Your Cheating Heart” never gets old with the Coke salesman in the Pepsi commercial. Or is that a Pepsi salesman in a Coke commercial.
* I didn’t like the reinvented Camry commercial at all. But I did like the concept of a reinvented Department of Motor Vehicles office, complete with ice cream and a putting green. There’s something there for all businesses to ponder.
-------------Berry Tramel can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including AM-640 and FM-98.1. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter @BerryTramel. Visit Berry's website here.
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First, the coca cola stuff is OLD HAT. Wow, polar bears, way to really reach for something new and creative, Coke. It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t dazzling, it was BLAH. And the Pepsi one was equally as horrible, which they tried to make “hip” for all the twenty year olds by throwing in an obligatory flavor flav.
And that pretty much sums up all the Ads this superbowl, BLAH. Either come big or go home, and it felt like all these advertisers just mailed it in. No creativity, nothing hillarious. Just crap that you consider stellar.
The only one in my opinion that made the grade was the “Here ya go” dog.