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February 2001

Superbowl Commercials HOT or not???

Bunny Sez:

Not!! SuperSunday sucked this year. I thought this year’s SuperBowl was a complete bummer because the game sucked, too. “Too” you say? Okay, IMHO the SuperBowl should be renamed the AdBowl!! Like most women, I watch it for the commercials. They are my favorite part of the sacred January ritual - The Superbowl - a ritual that keeps many a Madison Avenue advertising firm in business for the upcoming year. Where do advertisers draw their inspiration from? I think too many of them use other ads rather than their creativity to come up with something to make us laugh or cry or most importantly to remember their product.

Companies spent more money this year on SuperBowl advertising than any other year - a whopping $2.4 million per 30 second ad slot. If you do the math that comes to $76,667 per second!! Is this too much money? Budwiser’s “Whassssssup” guys would say: True. Three days post SuperBowl and I can only remember 3 ads……BUT I do remember the companies the ads pitched for too - which is what the advertisers want. Electronic Data Systems’ “Running of the squirrels” ad was great (as was their “Cat Herders” ad from last year). Pepsi’s parody on Viagra with Bob Dole was sooooo much better than that annoying little girl that they have overused to the max. And E-Trade’s monkey on horseback commercial where he rode through the ruins of an imaginary Dot-com world was very “Planet of the Apes”-esque. The hysterical part of the ad was when a sock creature (eerily reminiscent of Pet.com’s annoying sock puppet dog) lands at the monkey’s feet. E-trade did a monkey ad last year, too. Remember the monkey and the 2 guys clapping to music saying, “We just blew 2 million bucks”?

But at SuperBowl XXXV, where was an ad comparable to Nuveen’s that showed Christopher Reeve walking? Where was an ad on the level of Fed Ex’s delivery of helium filled balloons to the munchkins? (Sure, that one got banned by the anti-inhalant people but EVERYONE talked about it for weeks after the game). Where was a Mean Joe Greene drinking a coke? The Bud Bowl? The “I want to claw my way to middle management” ad from monster.com?

The only thing that saved the SuperBowl from super suckage was namely, a pack of rowdy squirrels, a horseback riding monkey and Bob Dole expounding on the youthful power of...Pepsi.

Coug Sez:

OK, I agree with the part about the sock puppet, he had to go!!

It’s true, this year paled in comparison with some of the classics from the past ten years, but nevertheless, there were some quality spots that had people talking the next day. Personally, my favorite was the Bob Dole Pepsi commercial that Bunny alluded to earlier…..you could just hear America scream at the TV, “not another Viagra spot, these are supposed to be entertaining ads!”.

Other highlights included my main man, Cedric, getting busy in the kitchen with his Bud Lights, only to have them explode all over his girlfriend when he opened them back at the couch. This was the first commercial shown during the game, and based upon that fact, I expected a little more from the rest of them. Memo to CBS: If you start with a killer ad, there’s no where to go but down. Who amongst us hasn’t been greeted post Super Bowl with “What ARE YOU DOING?” the same way we were all greeted with “Whasssssssup?” after last years game? The people at Anheuser-Busch have somehow come up with another catch phrase that they will probably milk until Super Bowl XXXVI. Another cute one was the Budweiser ad where the guy needs room in his refrigerator for his beer, so he feeds all his leftovers to his dog, Otto. You then see that Otto can no longer fit through his doggy door. I may be partial to this one because we have a cat that sort of reminds me of Otto. Ching is LIVID!

Just before kickoff, this bedtime fairy tale describes a handsome prince taking a young princess off to happily ever after. Except, as the bedtime-story-reading mom explains to her little girl, ever after "doesn't always work out." She should know; the mom is Sarah Ferguson, who now has to fend for herself financially and handle her investments online. I’d have to put this one into the category of brilliant.

So all in all, I’d say that while there were probably more misses than hits, the ads were more entertaining then watching Kerry Collins impersonate an NFL quarterback.

See all Superbowl XXXV ads here!