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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
What $2.4 million bought Super Bowl advertisers: A unicorn, talking birds, lots of chimpanzees and one overextended boob joke.
Feb 7, 2005 | $80,000 per second. That's how much Fox charged America's richest companies to turn last night's Super Bowl into a small masterpiece of waste and insipid mediocrity -- one of the ad industry's worst performances ever.
The annual buzz surrounding each year's slate of new Super Bowl ads has always been one of America's most loathsome media rituals. This year was no exception.
The bummer always begins when those "We just can't wait to see what those nutty ad guys will come up with this year!" stories start trickling into the news and sports sections sometime early in the week before the game. This is usually followed by the annual viruslike outbreak of that apparently incurable media cliché -- "I only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials" -- that strikes at least 50 pundits and on-air celebrities every year. Lastly, the term "Super Bowl of Commercials" is mentioned at least 5,000 times the last 48 hours of pre-game broadcasts, in each case delivered as if it is being coined for the first time.
We had all of that this year, but advances in communications technology also allowed us to experience new and virulent strains of the usual clichés. A columnist named Rainbow Rowell from the Omaha World-Herald announced that he was going to record the Super Bowl for the first time, but only "because of TiVo -- because it lets you watch the commercials without sitting through any of the game itself."
This year also saw a variation of the "controversial ad unjustly yanked at last minute by buck-passing network pussies" story, which has become a sort of Bowl week staple. Last year, of course, CBS pulled an anti-George Bush ad commissioned by MoveOn.org, as well as an animal-rights ad produced by PETA, citing a network policy against issue-advocacy ads.
This year, the censorship theme was not naked political cowardice, but prudishness. Fox killed two ads. One was an Anheuser-Busch spot that depicts last year's "wardrobe malfunction" incident as being the fault of a beer-loving stadium stagehand who accidentally breaks Janet Jackson's nipple-ring bustier -- by using it to open his Budweiser. The spot, which has been described as "almost" funny, was deemed too controversial and killed.
The other ad Fox yanked was an Airborne cold remedy spot that apparently revealed, for a split second, the naked buttocks of Mickey Rooney. Its cancellation might yet prove to be the least-protested act of censorship in TV history.
As for the ads that did make it on air, it was clear right from the start that Madison Avenue was determined to play things very close to the vest this year, in the wake of last year's Super Bowl debacle -- known in the business as the "Crude Bowl." Last year's ad crop, which featured a farting horse and a testicle-chomping dog, was roundly denounced as being unusually tasteless and unfunny even by Madison Avenue standards. Continuing fallout from the Janet Jackson incident also doubtless affected agency thinking this time around. The result was a collection of the most inane, soft-edged, appallingly saccharine commercials the Big Game has ever seen.
No matter how awful the ad crop might be as a whole, every Super Bowl always has one big winner, one spot that sticks in the public's mind.
It might be an impressive piece of darkly obscure cinematic gibberish (Ridley Scott's Orwellian Apple ad in 1984), a memorable celebrity skit (Bird and Jordan's 1993 game of horse; Visa's "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" spot in 2002) or the punishing repetition of some unforgettably annoying slogan (Whasssuuuuup!).
Even in 2003, widely considered one of the weakest Super Bowl ad crops ever, we were at least given the "Terry Tate, linebacker" spots, which were genuinely funny for at least 10 seconds.
Not this year. The 2005 Super Bowl crop was so lame, it would have been brightened by a Gilbert Gottfried anti-drug spot shot in an AIDS hospice.
The dominant themes were obnoxious talking animals, subdued performances by B-list celebrities, and trite vehicle ads featuring very little zooming and lots of mute, ponderous stills of parked cars. The T&A factor was scaled down to CBN levels, and the only visually innovative ad (for DirecTV) revolved around a strikingly depressing tale of a man who travels through time from beautiful youth to infirm old age, ending right where he began -- in front of a television.
The manly-truck-ad genre, normally good for at least one entertainingly outrageous variation of the pickup-tows-aircraft-carrier-up-Kilimanjaro theme, was a flop from the start. GMC (to its credit) played it safe, hyping its Sierra by covering it completely with mud and driving it down a hill. Boilerplate truck stuff, a solid B-minus.
