Here is our first take on the hits and misses of the game, by category:

CELEBRITY

Hit - Desperate Housewives (ABC) - Shaquille O’Neal, Hugh Hefner etc.
Instant Analysis - A nice job of using celebrity to show that absolutely everyone is watching Desperate Housewives. Turns celebrity on its head. ABC does a nice job of using its own time to build one of its own brands.

Hit - Debit MasterCard - MacGyver
Instant Analysis - We reviewed this spot before the game (click here to read review and watch video). It does a great job of bringing the God of Small Things - MacGyver - to the card for small things - Debit Mastercard. A good balance of big-game production value and solid marketing.

Miss - Pizza Hut Cheesy Bites - Jessica Simpson
Replace Carls and Paris Hilton with Pizza Hut and Jessica Simpson and you have this equally irrelevant spot which uses sex in a puzzling way. It not only fails to support the brand - it does not even make sense in context. Click Here to view.

HUMOR

Hit - Sprint Phones - Two spots do a nice job of showing the benefits of high speed phones with TV and downloads for Sprint. The first has the phone with the extra benefit of “Crime Deterrent.” The second is about the music and ends up with a Benny Hill romp around the room. What makes these work is that the humor connects to the product and the brand and the phone is very visible in both. Click Here to view.

Miss - AmeriQuest Mortgage - The ‘Don’t be too quick to judge’ spots are both very funny, but even professionals will have a hard time remembering the brand - which shows up only at the end of each spot. Click Here to view.

CAUSE MARKETING

Hit - Campaign for Real Beauty (Dove) - We have been critical of Dove using the Campaign to sell Dove Moisturizing lotion (click here) but for the Super Bowl Dove used its marketing dollars to promote the campaign instead. In the end, this will do more for Dove than the earlier spots. (Click Here to view)

Miss - The Beer Institute - The Beer Institute? Beer needs an industry group? It was nice to learn all of those foreign words for ‘cheers’ but with Budweiser spending nearly $20 million on the Super Bowl, nobody was going to forget Beer. (Click Here to view anyway.)

NEW PRODUCT INTRODUCTION

Hit - Hummer H3 (General Motors) - This is an older spot we have previously reviewed (click here) but one that worked well for the big game. Even though we would like more face time for the Hummer, this spot reinforces the ruggedness of the brand very well. (Click Here and turn of your pop-up blocker to view the spot).

Miss - Full Throttle (Coca-Cola) - This pre-game epic spot pulls out all the stops to convince you that you’ll be meaner and badder with Full Throttle Energy drink - including running a Red Bull car off the road. At the end we’re confused and Coke is a bit poorer.

Miss - Gillette Fusion (Procter & Gamble) - Not as bad as we had expected from the preview spot, but a flop nonetheless. Gillette does try to give us a plausible reason for adding two blades and draining our wallet further (more contact points equals less pressure equals less skin irritation) but it seems weak and irrelevant. We’re still more interested in real fusion - or maybe cold fusion. (Click Here to view - 2nd Quarter spot.)

OTHER NOTABLES

Hit - Budweiser Clydsdales (Anheuser-Busch) - Anheuser-Busch wasted a lot of money during the big game with spots that were all over, many of which were just forgettable beer commercials. This one, however, connected at an emotional level. Fortunately, the Clydsdales are so closely tied to Budweiser that there is no question which beer the spot is pushing. And the value of authenticity seems like it is Bud’s best brand proposition. (Click Here to view - 3rd Quarter)

Miss - Emerald Nuts - In the early 1990’s in Los Angeles, we learned that random success (like buying some beach property in L.A. in the 1970’s) makes people think they are geniuses. But sooner or later this random-ness fails. After spectacular luck last year with a quirky little spot, these random geniuses failed spectacularly. But perhaps the real nut fans will love it. (Click Here to view)

Brand: MasterCard
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here - this link is to Ad-Rag which requires a small fee to view ads
Target: MasterCard Cardholders
Rating: *****
Reviewer: David

Description:
We see a car carrier being driven through the desert by an average guy driving a slurpee. Then the voiceover begins, “12 brand new cars for you, your family and friends - zero dollars.” We see the average guy giving various friends and relatives new cars and their reactions (from bewilderment to tears). The voiceover continues, “How it feels to hand them the keys - Priceless. Use your MasterCard and you could win 12 brand new cars.”

What Works:
We review this spot to illustrate the multiple benefits of a strong campaign. The MasterCard, “Priceless” campaign is one of the longest-running, hardest-working campaigns on television today. MasterCard taps into a basic and seemingly non-commercial human sentiment - that it is not the things in our life but the people and the moments that have true value. MasterCard shows that the credit card is merely an enabler of human interaction - and in these spots the human interaction being enabled are almost always either extremely touching or hysterically funny moments.

MasterCard’s campaign is savvier than its near-twin brand VISA because it does not seek to compete with American Express and their neo-snob campaign of exclusivity. And it it not a big grab for market share - MasterCard correctly recognizes that most of the decision about whether a consumer will acquire a Visa or a MasterCard comes as a result of marketing by member banks. Instead, MasterCard uses this campaign to encourage cardholders to see MasterCard as the niftiest little tool since the diaper genie. From a brand positioning standpoint, MasterCard is the card that enables the great moments in life to happen. Instead of being ‘Everywhere you want to be,’ MasterCard savvily points out that you are already where you want to be - with friends and family - but could be having more fun.

The benefit of such an effective campaign is that it allows the advertiser to do more with less. This spot is an excellent example. In fifteen seconds, it not only reminds us of the core benefit of Mastercard, it perfectly sets up a loyalty promotion (a car sweepstakes). We understand the proposition of the sweepstakes and have a clear sense of the end benefit of winning - which is not ‘getting more stuff’ but the feeling of giving which lasts much longer.

The best sign of a great campaign is the feeling of pleasure it gives us when we recognize a new spot in the campaign - that “let’s see what those folks are doing this time,” anticipatory chuckle. Mastercard delivers this consistently.

What Doesn’t:
It’s hard to fault MasterCard for any of the basic choices in this spot, but it should be said that a very low percentage of automobiles are purchased with a credit card - so delivering cars as the goodies from the sweepstakes is not the obvious choice for MasterCard. As all of the cars pictured are GM as far as we could tell (and please remember that we’re an Advertising Blog and not car experts, but a Cadillac and a Saab stood out) perhaps there was a lucrative manufacturer tie-in with General Motors that reduced the cost of the promotion to MasterCard.

Branding Bottom Line:
MasterCard knocks Visa out of the ring and into the hands of a new agency.