This year is mostly depressing, really. We do have a wide range of super bowl spots from overall suck to poorly conceived to poorly executed and at the far end of the spectrum, flat out racist. It's unfortunate that on our industry's most bloated night, we can only come up with 3 or 4 thumbs up ads...
By far the winner of the night for me was Tide. A simple concept, but interestingly executed and still uncomfortably funny. It may have lost points just because I was waiting for the skittles logo to pop in the whole time. But still, by far my favorite of the night.
Coke made a good showing, so I'll give them the second slot. I can't say Carville and Frist had the best chemistry on screen, but it's a good effort. And this year, it frankly doesn't take much to get near the top. On a side note, Carville is married to uber-Republican strategist Mary Matalin. Wouldn't it have been better if the spot had something to do with that? I seriously doubt most the country knew who either one of them were anyway...
Third goes to Fed Ex. At least they got something out of their production dollar. It's a good looking spot that'll probably give them some good use. Still nowhere as good as last year.
Fourth, back to Coke. It's a good spot, but I think I may just be suffering from the high expectations Coke built up last year. When you hit so many home runs, it's that much harder to leg out a triple from a double.
And fifth I'll throw to the boys over at Dallas' Richards Group. Both the Bridgestone spots were funny and entertaining and scored up near the top of every ad tracker.
Honorable mention goes to Audi for the Godfather. It feels like something is missing, but it's an intriguing spot at the very least.
And the big losers, Career Builder sucked it bad. I wonder if they're regretting the decision to ditch Cramer Kressalt this morning. My guess would be yes. Whoever made that decision is a fucking moron. Geico should have let the Cavemen die. It was already ruined by the awful ABC show, and the only way to save it would have been to bring the original Cavemen back. I hate these guys for ruining a funny bit. And, Sales Genie. Hopefully racism does not mean sales and they consider either stopping the non sense or hiring some proper help next year. Under Amour should be mentioned as wasting a fuck ton of money for an overproduced mess. It looked like they cut corners, used an unoriginal idea and tried to say or nothing or too much. I haven't really figured it out yet.
And that's all for this year. Many more like this and these day after write ups will probably stop being written. At least Miller picked up the pieces a bit today.
Thank god. Really. Now we can go back to watching scripted crap rather than reality crap exclusively. It'll be interesting to see just how bad of a hit television took on this one. My gut tells me that it'll be bad, but not all that much worse than it would have been with no strike. The technologies to replace the traditional television viewing experience just haven't arrived to the mass audience yet, and until apple tv or some such gets more pervasive, the networks have a pretty good stranglehold on the middle american living room.
