The Super Bowl ads: This is what $3 million gets you these days

please could you label them so i can look them up

thanks

lets fall in love and see those clouds from above

the streaker cracked me the hell up. :-P

....ah, those puppies were so damn cute. :-)

OK, this is likely to be longwinded, because for whatever reason, Superbowl ads are an obsession of mine ever since college, where a group of friends and I got together and muted the game but watched the commercials.  I'm weird that way.

Part of my obsession this year was Twitter - I pulled up Tweetgrid, with three columns to monitor hashtags about ads, #superads, #sbads09, #sb43ads, which became top 10 topics on Twitter, with dozens of Tweets flying by every minute - I actually had a headache reading that much by the end of the first quarter.  There were ad execs, magazines like AdAge, the WSJ, all monitoring reaction to the ads in realtime, taking feedback and even responding to people.  Careerbuilder, eTradeBaby, Overstockdotcom and SobeWorld were all live, Tweeting back to responses to their ads, setting them up with 2 minute warnings - it was shockingly interactive.

One of the things that kept coming up was how differently people in the ad industry were responding to ads compare to the general public.  The execs were shocked at what worked and didn't work.  The Bridgestone Mr. Potato Head they thought was a home run, until viewers came out in force that it was incredibly sexist - shutting up women, putting them in the backseat.  Obviously, women hated GoDaddy, but so did the men, most saying that they thought less of Danica Patrick for being a part of the commercial.

Ad execs also thought the Budweiser Clydesdales were perfect (so did I, for a company trying to remain the "great American beer after being purchased by a European mega-corp, Clydesdale ads invoke the history of the company - I especially loved the "Fetch" ad).  The common man, however, seemed to think that Bud had been better in the past, and didn't do anything special, like back when they did the talking frogs.

Doritos won points for humor with the snow globes - it may have been low humor but it was one of the few ads thatcaused people to laugh out loud and Tweet it.  Careerbuilder's ad was loved by many at first, but people rewatching it found the repetition thing got old fast, and a common thread was "punching the koala" was the new "jumping the shark."  It was also reported that during the game, someone registered "punchingthekoala.com" as a domain name.

Connected campaigns were a mixed bag - one that mixed commercials with an online presence.  Hyudai, Visio, Denny's, and Jack-in-the-box (hangintherejack.com) all had a call to the web for an offer or more content, and didn't have the server capacity to handle the rush - the sites all crashed immediately.

For connected campaigns, I give the prize to to SoBe, they of the 3-D dancing lizards. I went out of my way to get 3-D glasses for the ads, and had Tweeted success on finding them.  30 minutes later, I had a new follower on Twitter, SoBeWorld, who re-Tweeted my location for finding the glasses locally, and provided a YouTube link to watch the 3-D commercial online Saturday. Lee the Lizard, as he called himself, continued to Tweet all weekend, in the persona of a partying lizard, providing a lot of interaction, plus updates from his fellow lizards that were at the parties and the game Tweeting away.  What struck me was that while it was probably a team of actors handling everything, they stayed to one voice and personality on the character the whole weekend, and if you addressed a Tweet to them, they repsonded every single time, as a lizard, commiserating with the lizard dancers in the commercials, or tailgaiting, or whatever was appropriate - and they kept the hashtags mentioned above in every Tweet, growing the conversation the whole time.  They kept a sense of humor, and really managed to draw people in.  Somebody give that ad agency an award for sticking with the bit.

eTradebaby did much the same thing, but commenting on the game with diaper jokes and such.  Cute, but not quite as organized.

What did I think of the ads overall? Nothing stood out on its own, though some stood out from their tie ins, obviously.  Nothing resorted to gay baiting, either to my sensibilities or the Twitterverse, though several resorted to sexism, to varying degrees of success.  The Telefloral ad, above, women hated, but the Twitterverse came back strong and said that women were not even remotely the target audience, and it resonated big with men, 2 weeks before Valentines Day.

The most interesting thing to me, was actually the online interaction, in Twitter, but also on Hulu, thummit.com, etc, where brands turned to the web for instant reaction to what worked - the market reasearch that came out of the ads had to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sorry about the rambling, but like I said, I've had a 20 year fascination with this marketing blitz. 

sexy dancing bear matt light in sobe ad. woof! 'nuf said ;-)

both doritos ads were meh. guy crunches chip, woman's clothes fiy off. gee... i wonder if their target audience is 13 to 18 year old boys. the other ad had a guy get hit in the crotch with a crystal ball. they spent $6 million on this... really?

i thought the cash4gold ad was kinda sad (aside from the fact that the company is ripping off people). ed mcmahon looked like he was at death's door. 

Boy, he's cleaned up purty.  Great haircut, trimmed beard...serious woof.

My personal favorite ad from last night was the "Crystal Ball" ad by Doritos. Yes, it did feature a guy being hit in the crotch with a snow globe but Super Bowl ads are supposed to be pure Lowest Common Denominator.

I also loved the two ads for Bridgestone with Mr. Potato Head and the lunar landing module.