by Marty Predd, 28, guest blogger
At first, the thought of guest blogging about this year’s Super Bowl commercials seemed like a good idea. As a Millennial, football lover and a market researcher what more could I ask for in a topic?
Sad to say, after five hours in front of the TV and far more smokey links than any one person should have in a day, I was disappointed. Although there were a few notable exceptions (more on those tomorrow), the ads I saw yesterday ranged from uninspired to gimmicky to frankly bizarre. So rather than give any one of these lackluster attempts at advertising genius the honor of its very own extended critique, let me offer instead three descriptions of the TYPES of ads I saw yesterday, and why, for me, they fall short.
1. The Not-So-New SuperBowl Spot
What could be better than a toddler in a high chair talking like a frat boy at a night club? For the folks at , apparently the answer was ‘two’. This is the classic example of a modestly clever idea played well beyond its useful (ahem, interesting) life. A toddler speaking like an adult is a tad creepy, so you have to wonder who thought it would be a smart idea to wow an audience expecting the newest and most creative in advertising with….the same ad concept you ran LAST SuperBowl?
PriceLine – Shatner the Negotiator
Given the fact that PriceLine has put most, if not all, of its advertising eggs in Shatner’s basket, I’m not sure what I’d recommend for them as far a new and exciting Super Bowl ads are concerned. While there may be some wisdom in their ‘if it’s not broken, don’t fix it’ approach, it’s not going to win them any awards for creativity or excitement, at least not in my book.
New? No. But this Coke Zero spot is probably the best in the category of not-so-new SuperBowl ads. Unlike its peers, it succeeds by at least changing up the format a bit. It’s not immediately apparent that the outraged Coke executives will be making a showing, and this lends an element of surprise (and therefore newness) to an otherwise same-old spot.
2. All Bells and Whistles
I like new technology as much as the next guy (and maybe more so), but the flashiest new animation techniques and 3D wizardry, are not a substitute for a relevant message. Sobe’s “Dancers” spot is the epitome of this form-no-function approach to the SuperBowl ad. With absolutely no sarcasm at all (really), I can say that I was impressed by the frolicking athletes, amorphous dancing blob, and the strange menagerie of other creatures used in this spot, but I was left clueless as to the intended message: If you want to know where to find great animators using the best technology, call Sobe? Perhaps if I had dug through my treasure chest of childhood memories for that pair of 3D glasses, the message would have been apparent to me? I somehow doubt it, but even if it were….Unless you’re selling light sabers, it’s probably not the best idea to limit your sphere of relevance to an audience of techies and nine-year-old boys.
Coke seems to have made a tradition out of making elaborate ads in which nature and a Coke bottle unite. The animation is amazing, and I’m even occasionally left with the same kind of warm-fuzzies that might come from watching a scene in Lord of the Rings or some other animated fantasyland. Yet, no matter how artsy or metaphorical I try to think about it, it always seems like a giant stretch to me, one that only a mega-brand like Coke could pull off. That doesn’t mean they should.
Eat Doritos, and money will spew out of ATM machines, gorgeous women’s clothes will magically blow off…and you’ll get hit by a bus, but survive. Visually impressive? Perhaps. Relevant? Not so much.
3. Silly Masquerading as Cool
Much as there is a fine line between genius and insanity, there’s a fine line between cool and plain silly. Pepsi’s ‘Pepsuber’ is decidedly on the silly side of the line. In what appears to be a MavGyver parody, hero MacGruber fails to disarm a ticking bomb by wasting too much time shamelessly promoting his sponsor, Pepsi. The spot ends with a long shot of the bomb (and the ship upon which it resides) blowing up. I’m tempted to try to interpret what this catastrophic ending says about Pepsi, but doing so would presume that there was meaning there to be discerned in the first place. To be fair, Pepsi wasn’t completely off base in trying to reach out to Millennials using what you might call ‘ironic’ humor – the same humor that makes Conan O’Brien’s ‘Walker Texas Ranger’ segments so popular. Yet Pepsi appears to have missed a fundamental component to this humor equation: MacGuyver and Walker Texas Ranger are funny because they were originally created to be SERIOUS; it’s only in retrospect that their sincere cheesiness is funny. Pepsuber plainly lacks this sincerity and consequently seems a bit like a little brother trying way too hard to be cool by mimicking his older siblings.
Overstock.com: ‘Carlos Boozer’
This spot started with real promise, but fell painfully flat. The idea of kids learning to ‘surf’ (the Web) with a professional basketball player is clever and could be actually be funny, if a bit cutesy. But then the commercial switches to an almost sentimental tone revolving around Boozer’s gold medal, leaving the appetite for a punch line severely disappointed.
The humor is completely one-note: the Grim Reaper isn’t happy with how his accountant did his taxes. It’s a funny hypothetical scenario, but there is so little in the way of a story line here (even for a 30-sec spot), that the laughter about the premise ends long before the commercial does.
Tomorrow: Commercials that actually hit the mark.
Marty Predd is 28-year-old marketing researcher living in Portland, OR who specializes in technology and Millennial marketing.
