COMMENTARY: First Thoughts on the Super Bowl
Issue: A slow Super Bowl for new Advertising Ideas
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri
The Super Bowl is the last refuge for destination advertising in America, the last place that people actively seek out television advertising instead of shunning it.
Given that, it’s a shame that advertisers did not make better use of the opportunity this evening. Although there were some interesting themes this year, the strongest trend seemed to be a resurgence of animals in advertising. Although we thought the Blockbuster spot was fairly well executed and the dog spot by Budweiser predictably tugged at heartstrings, the Bud Light Gorillas and Taco Bell Lions were less memorable.
This Super Bowl also cemented a trend that has been growing throughout the year – consumer generated advertising. The two spots, a Frito-Lay and one for the NFL were both interesting and stronger than the average agency-produced spot for this Super Bowl.
Two standounts in the largely undistinguished field were the General Motors “All by Myself” robot spot, touting GM’s 100,000 mile warranties and the Coca-Cola Bottle spot promoting black history month and the historic black coach matchup at the Super Bowl.
Picking the worst spot might be difficult this year, but the spot most likely to damage the career of its actor goes to Revlon and Sheryl Crow, with a tedious and undistinguished ad for hair color. Kevin Federline dreaming of stardom while working at a fast-food restaurant gets an honorary mention.
More to come this week, but these are our first thoughts.
February 5th, 2007 at 2:24 am
Kevin Federline's spot was the best of the bunch and was very funny. I found my self watching that one more than once on the Tivo.
February 5th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
The manufacturing geeks over at the Evolving Excellence blog (www.evolvingexcellence.com) are thrashing the GM commercial as well. Fundamentally they say the reason Toyota has such high quality is due to their respect for people, which creates employee continuous improvement suggestion programs, which robots can’t do. Instead of firing someone (or a robot) over a dropped screw, Toyota would get a team of people together to figure out what process failure led to the screw being dropped… not canning tens of years of experience for a mistake that probably wasn’t the person’s (robot’s) fault. It’s a good read:
http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2007/02/gm…