February 04, 2008

Big, Dumb, Expensive Super Bowl Ads

As advertisers get conned by agency and media hype into believing that their Super Bowl buys are just a promotional platform, they are forgetting something -- if the spots are no good, the rest is irrelevant.

Continuing a dreadful trend, Super Bowl commercials got bigger, more expensive and stupider than ever this year. Production once again trumped concept.

The majority were witless and unoriginal. The tired formulas of talking animals, talking babies, irrelevant celebrities, and frat house tit jokes were trotted out for the LXIInd time. The bad old days of dot-com style advertising seem to be creeping back -- 28 seconds of something incomprehensible followed by a 2 second logo.

A few mentions:

~ GoDaddy, as usual, led the way in idiocy.
~ CareerBuilder got the crap it deserved after firing the agency that made them famous.
~ Bud Light "fire breathing" was funny. "Flying" was not.
~ My favorite spot was for Tide (the talking shirt.) Not only was it funny, it actually made a point.
~ Biggest and dumbest award to Under Armour.

As I write this I realize how few of the spots I just watched I can recall.

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