It’s like they used to say: Coke adds life.
Marketers paid Fox up to $5.4 million a minute to tickle, touch and ultimately tout their wares during Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast.
Just as the big game can be counted upon to annually draw the year’s largest TV audience, it also is reliably a hit-or-miss affair for advertisers in their biggest contest of the year as well.
Perfection, on the field and off, proved elusive.
Coca-Cola didn’t show up until the fourth quarter, but the very best ad of the whole game was clearly the one with Underdog and Stewie Griffin cartoon balloons from New York’s Thanksgiving parade wrestling for a giant Coke bottle balloon.
It was light and sweet and had a nice little surprise at the end. Coke’s ad with Bill Frist and James Carville bonding over a cola wasn’t quite as good, but engaged just the same.
FedEx scored a huge “coo” with its carrier pigeons. The bit with the big birds run amok was hilarious. Like tracking an overnight package, you could see it coming and you were pleased when it got there.
Now, as a typical viewer, I’m going to be hard-pressed to remember that the Toyota Sedona and Nissan Murano were advertised during the game. But I will not soon forget the understated genius of the Hyundai Genesis commercials. No gimmicks, just a really good car ad.
The Miami Heat’s Dwayne Wade went from flattered to flustered as chatty former pro basketball star-turned-TV analyst Charles Barkley added him to his T-Mobile “Fave 5.” So long as you have caller ID and Sir Charles doesn’t have your number, you should be in fine shape. Funny, funny ad.
Tide’s “Silence the Stain” ad for its cleansing pencil was spot on. Everyone who has had a sloppy lunch knows how you feel like when no one sees anything or hears anything but that smudge on your shirt. OK, maybe it’s just me, but still. …
The talking baby buying stock with E-Trade left me worried my 4-year-old is going to get online one day and bankrupt me. Cute ad, even with the spit-up at the end, but kind of scary, frankly.
And let me get this straight. GoDaddy.com bought an ad so we’ll go to our computers and watch their real ad? Yeah. Right.
Bottoms up
Most of the Super Bowl beverage ads had one wondering, as often as not, what the ad people were drinking. Some hit real highs. Others were a bad trip.
Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light spot touting the ability to breathe fire was funny enough, but isn’t it a tad counterintuitive to imply a beer will make your breath hot enough to torch tablecloths? Whatever happened to quenching thirst?
And contrary to the Bud Light ad saying the ability to fly is no longer included, you just have to drink an awful lot to achieve that goal. Alas, you do feel like you’ve been sucked through a jet engine afterward.
I do not want to contemplate the Amp energy drink with the battery clamps, the smoke and the … eww.
PepsiCo’s Gatorade G2 ad let the grass grow beneath the feet of New York Yankees star Derek Jeter (and Peyton Manning of the Indianapolis Colts, too) in a cool way. Sure, it could be construed as some sort of hallucination, but it’s more interesting than just a caffeine buzz.
When Sobe’s Life Water splashes into lizards’ mouths, they start doing the “Thriller” dance with Naomi Campbell. When Shaquille O’Neal downs Vitamin Water, he thinks he can be a jockey. It usually takes alcohol, and lots of it, to produce this level of bizarreness.
Bud Light’s wine and cheese ad, with beer and a TV being spirited into a couples’ party, played to the old cliche of guys not wanting to do what their girlfriends and wives do. Kind of makes you wonder how they got together with the women in the first place.
The sleepyheads awakened by Diet Pepsi Max in the ginseng-fueled soft drink’s tribute to the old “Saturday Night Live” Roxbury Boys sketch included Joe Buck. The cameo by “SNL” alum Chris Kattan was nice, but a visit by Will Ferrell would have been better.
Ferrell showed up in a halftime ad for his coming pro basketball comedy and a first-rate fourth-quarter ad combining that movie and Bud Light.
Current “SNL” cast member Andy Samberg showed up in Justin Timberlake’s Pepsi ad in which he was dragged toward some prize-seeking fan slurping down a soda. A pop star suffering a groin injury? That’s quality entertainment.
But no matter how much Bud Light you drink, Carlos Mencia will not seem original or funny. Who thinks accent jokes are entertaining in 2008?
Why the long face, Thunder? The Budweiser beer ad in which a Clydesdale fails to make the cut for the Bud team then trains with a Dalmatian, a la Rocky, to make a comeback was a feel-good. Old fashioned. Solid.
Ditto for the dog with the water bowl filled with Gatorade.
I mostly skipped the halftime ads, but the Geico cavemen reflecting on the failed ABC sitcom was maybe the best yet in that absent-of-late campaign.
The squeal of peeling rubber might have been preferable to all the screams — from a terrified squirrel to an owl to a passenger riding shotgun — in the Bridgestone ad, which seemed to plug the handling of the speeding car as much as the tires that steered clear of the critter/would-be road kill.
The payoff came in the second half with Bridgestone’s night-time version, which included a deer in headlights, Alice Cooper and Richard Simmons. That one was a winner, even if it meant Simmons escaped danger.
The front end of a Mercedes was sacrificed in Audi’s leisurely ode to “The Godfather,” but there was still horsepower to spare. A bland Mercedes S Class ad later showed the luxury car still has some life in it.
Badgers? Maybe we do need some stinking badgers. The Toyota spot selling the quiet of a Corolla with the animals poised to slash some poor guy’s face probably should have ended like something out of the backseat of the car in “Pulp Fiction” but thankfully didn’t.
The Cars.com ads with the salesman facing a possible beating in a ring of fire or a shrunken head were overkill. The CareerBuilder.com spot with the bleeding heart was memorable yet gross, but the follow-up with the faerie getting taken out by a spider scored. Tribune Co., parent of the Chicago Tribune, has a stake in both Web sites.
I won’t lie. Under Armour’s spot scared me. I don’t want my underwear and sneakers to aspire to world domination. The way they were affecting the athletes in the ad, I got the sense Major League Baseball, the Olympics and other sports entities soon will be testing for it.
Doritos’ song commercial was fine as far as it went. The payback for the snack brand surely was in the contest the snack-chips brand sponsored, not the unremarkable music video.
The subsequent Doritos spot with the guy in the mouse suit pouncing on the guy with the mouse trap might have been amusing in some other context. Coming after FedEx’s giant pigeons, it was too long a walk for too little crunch.
Of the movie ads, Pixar’s “Wall-E” and George Clooney and Renee Zellweger’s comedy “Leatherheads” seemed the most promising. “Wanted,” “Iron Man” and “Jumper” were flashy. The “Chronicles of Narnia” sequel and the Adam Sandler film (with the foreign accent) appeared skippable.
A line drawing of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill is a classic icon of struggle and hard work. But if you’re selling a GMC truck, shouldn’t the truck doing the heavy lifting? Or are they trying to tell us something about the Yukon hybrid?
They had ads?
Cargill, U.S. Cellular, Dell and Taco Bell had commercials. That’s what the notebook says. By the time you read this, we will all have forgotten.
Garmin’s GPS getting Napoleon to his troops in a classic old car needed an allusion to “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” to make all the anachronisms pay off.
An attractive woman can do wonders in adland, but Carmen Electra’s ad for Ice Cube gum didn’t stick and neither did Victoria’s Secret or the Sunsilk ad using the images of Marilyn Monroe, Shakira and Madonna.
Just asking: Wouldn’t the anti-drug ad have been more effective if it weren’t surrounded by so many beer ads?
And with all the money the National Football League is making off this game, Tom Brady’s United Way ad should have been a lot more impressive. The NFL.com ad, by comparison, and NFL Network plug at halftime were far better.
Meanwhile, men into the smell of nuts go crazy for an unfeminine woman after she rubs Planters cashews on herself. What would Freud say?
The biggest mystery of the night may have been the money SalesGenie.com’s spent on commercial time. The animated commercials looked like computer pop-up ads, the kind you normally try to block, only cheaper.
And SalesGenie apparently needs to be reminded: Foreign accents aren’t funny in 2008.
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philrosenthal@tribune.com
IN THE WEB EDITION: Watch the commercials that scored during the Super Bowl at chicagotribune.com/bowlads.
