ON THE BEST & WORST ADS FROM THE 41st SUPERBOWL ONLINE

PLAY BY PLAY

Updated 2.5.07:  Gizmodo has a good rundown of the Superbowl ad hits and misses.

YouTube is letting their users rank the SuperBowl commercials, with the winner unveiled on Tuesday, should be a fun game to watch in itself.

CBS itself has got all the commercials lined up as well (quarter by quarter, no less), but you need to make sure you have the latest versions of either your WIndows Media Player or RealPlayer all installed to see them...it's too bad if you're using an Apple Mac like yours truly tonight. 

Why, in the age of YouTube, do traditional media sites still make mainstream users jump through the hoops of downloading and launching standalone media players?  I know, I know, for the "better", higher definition quality of course, but is the trade-off worth it?.

Well that rant aside, the Colts beat Da Bears 29 to 17.

And the best, most creative, SuperBowl Commercial this year, in my humble opinion, is still the Coke Ad I highlighted a couple of days ago.  It's fitting indeed that the SuperBowl this year is being played in "Vice City", what with Grand Theft Auto game with that name being the inspiration for the Coke commercial.  That's one man's opinion, right or wrong.

We'll see how the zillions of other surveys online and off rate and rank the commercials.  For now, I'll continue with my take on the ads.

The Bud Light commercial with Mencia teaching English as a Foreign Language was a pretty good second tied with the OTHER Bud Light "But he had Bud Light" commercial. 

OK, the Taco Bell commercial with the two lions, was also a hoot.

The worst one this year has got to be the Dunkin Donuts "Maple Syrup" ad, followed closely by the Emerald Nuts "Robert Goulet" ad (what the heck was that one about??

Although a lot of polls loved the Bud Light "Rock, Paper, Scissors" ad, I thought it's inspiration, the Sprint ad that ran in last year's SuperBowl was funnier, probably because the basic concept was SO new and surprising back then.  Sprint tried something different, as this post from Influence 2.0 notes, spoofing drug company ads with it's ad for wireless broadband.

In the truck category, Toyota Tundra beats Ford hands down, especially with the big "See-Saw" commercial.  They made me want to buy a Toyota pick-up vs. a Ford, even though I'm not in the market for that product.

A new phenomenon this year of course was the "user-generated" ads trend, where Doritos, Chevrolet and others committed to run ads created by consumers.  The two Doritos ads, "Live the Flavor" (Fred Wilson's favorite ad), and "Checkout Girl", were pretty good, and hold up well against those produced by the pros, in terms of concept and selling the product proposition.

Fedex was pretty lame this year so far compared to the hilarious "Caveman" commercial last year. I still remember it a year later.

(More links to follow).

P.S.  As mentioned above, the inspiration for the winning Coke Ad above is obviously the controversial video game Grand Theft Auto, Vice City. 

If you're a fan of that game (like me), or if you've never played the game, check out these two videos from YouTube (Part 1 here, and Part 2 here).  Together, they're a TERRIFIC summary of the Vice City "story", and you get a good feel for what all the fuss was about.

It's a labor of love by TomH88 (lots of spoilers if you plan to play the game).

Each clip is a relatively long nine minutes or so, but well worth the investment, especially considering that you'd have to invest days to play the whole game and get the whole story.

P.S. 2:  TechCrunch has a good post on some relatively lame Web 2.0 "SuperBowl" commercials on YouTube, and where to go for the REAL Superbowl commercials online, both during and after the Big Game...YouTube, Google and Yahoo! are good places to start

Comments

[candice]

My favorite was sprint broadband...

One note, though, is that the CBS player doesn't support viewing on a second monitor. I always have to drag the browser back onto screen 1 to use it. (Things I learned catching up on CSI there instead of downloading it off bittorrent.)

[Peter Hershberg]

Nice summary. I personally thought most of the commercials were pretty lame, but there were definitely a few noteworthy ones.

For a slightly different take on this year's winners and losers, you can check out our 3rd annual "Search Marketing Scorecard." The study looks at how well advertisers used search to harness the buzz generated by their commercials and drive traffic to their web presence.

While there was much improvement over last year, it's clear that most advertisers still have a long way to go...

You can get a copy of the scorecard here: http://www.reprisemedia.com/scorecard.aspx

[Vikas Sah]

Hi Michael,

I have used a very objective criteria to rank the Super Bowl XLI advertisements to come up with top 10 most viewed and most discussed ones.

If you think this is something useful for your readers then please link to my post here: http://www.technacular.com/2007/02/05/most-viewed-and-most-discussed-super-bowl-xli-commercials/

Regards,
Vikas Sah
http://www.technacular.com

[Matt Keegan]

I thought the ads this year were pretty dismal. Some were downright hard to take -- Snickers, for example -- while Bud Lite continues to hold its own.

Career Builder was okay, but not memorable.

Anyone else think Prince looked ancient?