If you just paid attention to the ads during Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast — a difficult task, considering it was one of the better games in memory — you might come away thinking there is a lot of money floating around in this Internet business.
You would also think there is not a lot of clear thinking.
Although billed beforehand as a showcase for the burgeoning Web-site ad category, the advertising portion of the Super Bowl XXXIV telecast resembled, by the end, a dot.compost pile. Out were the familiar sponsors, and in were a whole lot of companies letting it ride on, say, a 30-second spot in quarter two.
There were too many dot.com ads to keep straight. What is the difference between a monster.com, an epidemic.com and a WebMD.com? It is unlikely that the obscure ads they spent much of their speculation-fueled fortunes to buy will inspire anybody to bother going to the Web sites to find out.
Within the category, there were too many that numbly adhered to what have already become cliches in advertising Internet destinations. A year ago, the look-how-refreshingly-amateur-we-are spots for E trade, computer.com and lifeminders.com would have been charming. By now, they are just the likeliest choice a Web company can make, a signal that fresh ideas are exactly what you will not find at those URLs.
And there were too many dot.com ads that left the cobwebs up — or spun new ones — in an already murky, confused, overloaded realm. Was WebMD.com really trying to suggest, as it appeared, that Muhammad Ali’s profound physical problems could have been more efficiently handled by a Web site than a flesh-and-blood doctor? That Ali “wasted” his time in “healthcare”? And does this company really want us to place our health in the hands of an outfit that does not know “healthcare” should be “twowords”?
These ads are targeted at Wall Street as much as Main Street, of course. but you like to think the nation’s financial players, and all the giddy stock buyers and venture capitalists out there, wouldn’t be fooled by a slick ad, much less some of the muddled ones Super Bowl viewers saw. The preponderance of such spots already — by our count, 25 of them during the game itself at an average cost of $2.2 million per 30 seconds — suggested otherwise.
All the Web ads did not ruin the great and growing spectator sport of Super Bowl ad watching. It is the one event in which everybody agrees to pay attention to the stuff in between the programming, a formulation that should give pause to companies paying network rates the rest of the year.
But the dot.com takeover did steal some of the fun. It’s just harder to connect with a company you’ve never heard of before than, say, a Mountain Dew, which turned in two very sharp new spots, or a BMW, which introduced its new sport utility vehicle with one dullard of an ad.
The judgments of the accompanying best and worsts were based primarily on entertainment value. If the spot also got across a product message, so much the better, but it was not an absolute requirement. If they want to spend their money to tell me a good joke, that’s fine with me and, I am confident, most viewers who do not hold stock in that company. (And I should note that dividing the superlatives by quarter meant slim pickings at times, especially in selecting the fourth quarter’s best.)
One marketing company survey suggested that close to 10 percent of viewers were watching, like the people putting this section together Sunday night, just for the ads. Factor in those who watched the ads along with the game, consider that 130 million Americans (almost half the population) were supposed to be watching, and then add up all the free publicity in stories like this one and the Washington Post advance story that cited the marketing survey, and the colossal ad rates start to make some business sense.
ABC’s “Good Morning, America” certainly seemed to understand this. It not only informed us it had regular Americans rating the ads as they watched for a segment on Monday’s broadcast, but it teased that Christopher Reeve, featured in a strange ad for a financial firm, would be talking Monday to cohost Diane Sawyer about why he agreed to do the ad.
The Reeve and Ali spots signaled a disturbing new trend. Real life human tragedies have already been exploited by the Olympics, the political conventions and the awards shows.
And Sunday the advertisers finally took their turns trotting out Ali and Reeve, seemingly decent men in sad circumstances who seem to be used to suggest a kind of second-hand nobility for whichever company or event is putting them forward this time.
The Ali ad, as noted, was exploitative for the false message it suggested. The Reeve one was less clear cut. For financial company John Nuveen & Co. it was set in the future — we knew because it said AIDS and cancer had also been cured — and an award for curing spinal cord injuries was being presented by, the camera eventually revealed, a walking Reeve. Less disturbing than the overall suggestion of trying to borrow some of the sympathy for Reeve was Nuveen’s direct message: Invest wisely for a better future.
Visa, too, tried to earn points by backing a social cause, with an ad that featured a woman pole vaulter doing her thing to a soundtrack of “I Enjoy Being a Girl.” The link from the message of women taking charge athletically to using a credit card was as illogical as a $25 late-payment fee, however.
There is a question, moot to most viewers, as to whether parodies really move product. The good ones at least keep things entertaining.
And one of the best, amazingly, came from Oldsmobile, the car that has been trying to insist for years now that it is not strictly for shuttling grandparents between the golf course and retirement condo.
It began with a bunch of beautiful 20-somethings singing, blandly and in bad voices, the 1980s Gary Numan hit “Cars.” Just as they became impossibly annoying, a sport (for an Olds) Oldsmobile drove up and scattered them. “It’s not what everybody else is doing,” said the tag line on this spot that effectively associated the car with a younger generation.
Just as that ad was especially savvy for its source, the U.S. Census bureau had one that was pretty funny for the government.
Trying to combat shrinking census return rates, the agency showed kids taking classes in a janitorial supply closet to get across its message that returning the forms is vitally important. The spot was reportedly bought at the last minute for the bargain price of $1.5 million when another advertiser with the bureau’s ad agency dropped out at the last minute.
In the beverage category, Mountain Dew was the hands down winner, its spot featuring a mountain biker chasing and catching a cheetah, then plucking a can of the caffeinated soda out of him a perfect blend of action, humor and message.
Another whistle-whetter, Budweiser ( along with ABC itself the biggest advertiser in the game), had a largely indifferent series of ads, including the game’s first, featuring a hard-working dog earning his Bud.
On the annoying side of the coin was ABCs barrage of ads for its upcoming Beach Boys movie. The network was more successful — although perhaps too subtle for most viewers — with a series of promos suggesting Regis Philbin, host of the sensation “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” would be joining the cast of such ABC series as “Sports Night,” “Dharma & Greg” and “NYPD Blue,” in the last as Sipowicz’s new partner. It turned out to be Philbin’s dream.
The Super Bowl’s absolute worst ad was also the longest. The entire halftime show, although sponsored by online trader E*Trade, was a spot for, as the voiceover at the end told us, “The Walt Disney World Millennium Celebration,” and not a very enticing one at that.
Edward James Olmos (why?) read text that sounded like a parody of sacred writing. The non-celebrities taking part, as drummers and dancers and such, wore outlandishly mismatched costumes.
The whole show played like the LSD-fueled hallucination of the worst interior designer in Topeka.
ABC, of course, is a Disney corporate entity so the halftime show was especially unseemly, a reminder of the extravaganza a couple of years back that became an ad for the House of Blues chain of faux blues bars.
The best Web ads were the most precise. The spot for AutoTrader.com, an on-line car buying service, told you exactly what the site did in a visually interesting, but not overwhelming, way: AutoTrader.com helps you find the car you want.
The worst ones, by contrast, tried to do too much. Monster.com, the job-search site, started with a solid concept to follow its phenomenally successful “I want to be a yes man” spot from last year. It would use lines from Robert Frost’s poem about taking “the road less traveled” to suggest that job seekers should use their site to take some risks of their own. The text, even edited down as it was, is perfect. But there was too much visual business in the black-and-white spot, which aired twice during the game, to let you hear what the words meant.
An example of the determinedly slack ones was E*Trade’s featuring two old guys and a dancing chimp in the company’s T-shirt. “Well, we just wasted two million bucks,” say the on-screen words. “What are you doing with your money?”
Not going to E*Trade, dude.
SUPER BOWL XXXIV:
The advertisers
Anheuser-Busch
AutoTrader.com
Blockbuster Video
BMW
Britannica.com
Buena Vista Pictures
Computer.com
Dreamworks
Seven-Up
EDS
E*Trade
Epidemic.com
Federal Express
Ford Motor Co.
Healtheon/WebMD
Hotjobs.com
Kforce.com
Lexus
Lifeminders.com
MicroStrategy
Monster.com
Motorola
Netpliance.com
John Nuveen
OnMoney.com
OurBeginning.com
Oxygen Media
Pepsi-Cola
Pets.com
Tropicana
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
U.S. Census
Universal Studios
Visa
Volvo
Wall Street Journal Interactive
World Wrestling Federation
