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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
Ford, however, went the comedy route and fell on its face. The comic plot involved a yuppie family in a minivan who shudder and lock their doors as they're passed on the highway by a scary biker gang. The scary biker gang then pull in to a roadside diner and hesitates when they sees a parking lot full of menacing black F-150 pickups. Frightened by the manly trucks, the bikers decide to leave. "The salad bar is better down the road," one of them says.
This is fine so far -- standard car-company humor -- but the tag line is the killer. "Ford," roars the narrator. "We don't just make our trucks tough, we make you tough." At the Super Bowl party where I was watching the game, the room exploded in laughter at this line, which sounded like an unintentional parody of macho car-commercial bullshit. It was the only ad all night that got a big laugh.
The digitally rendered talking animal factor, always high wherever large numbers of beer commercials are involved, was positively off the charts. The Emerald Nuts company, whose previous play-on-words-themed campaign was sort of interesting ("Evil Navigators love Emerald Nuts!"), opted in the Super Bowl to employ creepy digitized versions of a unicorn, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
Dad wants to eat all his Emerald Nuts himself, so he tells daughter that if she eats an Emerald Nut, "Unicorns will vanish forever." Enter creepy animated unicorn, who says, "That's not true!" This turns out to be the punch line. Cost of joke: $2.4 million.
Budweiser, which owes so much to the talking animal mascot, tried two creature spots. In one, an advancing mass of exotic wild animals (elephants, giraffes, etc.) breaks down a barn door to beg for the Bud Clydesdales' beer-pulling job. The ad makes some sort of joke, but you won't notice it because you'll be too busy wondering how you feel about a giant American corporation fantasizing about using endangered species as pack animals.
The other Bud creature is a talking cockatoo. The cockatoo has a Hispanic accent and is shown walking aggressively on a bartop, randomly bitching at some poor beer-drinking customer. The bird's money line is either "Adios, muchacho!" or "You don't want to go there, Buckwheat!"; it was hard to tell which. Clearly they're still working out the kinks with this bird thing.
Two different companies -- Verizon Wireless and an employment site called CareerBuilder.com -- ran spots starring chimpanzees (real ones, not digitized ones). The Verizon ad, which showed chimps talking into bananas as though they were cellphones, may have hit a little too close to home for the businessman viewer.
The CareerBuilder.com spots made more proper use of chimps, putting scads of them in office scenes and just letting them wreck shit and pester the office humans. If any of the Bowl ads win critical acclaim, it will probably be these.
In my opinion, only one ad in the group even came close to living up to the lofty standards of excellence we have come to expect of Madison Avenue. That was another Web site ad, for a domain-name company called GoDaddy.com. In this ad, a girl with huge breasts, dressed in a tight T-shirt with "GoDaddy.com" in stretched lettering, is testifying before some kind of congressional committee. Under heated questioning -- and repeated close-ups -- her top keeps sliding down, and she keeps giggling like an idiot. And that's the whole ad; 30 seconds of heaving honkers, ending in one punch line: "I didn't mean to upset the committee!" Now that's advertising!
That was it, the sole highlight. The lineup was so dull that one actually longed for a melodramatic Army ad or a brain-on-drugs public service message. But even here, in the area of insidious hidden messages, the crop was very weak. There was one clear dual-meaning ad, by Subway. In it, a policeman approaches a parked car with fogged windows, raps his nightstick on the car door, and discovers, in the car's front seat, two teenage boys chomping Subway hoagies. The cop in the ad, incidentally, looks like something out of the Village People. I'm guessing that this is an homage to some cult gay porn classic, but it's hard to say for sure. At least it wasn't Jared in the cop suit; that would have been the stuff of nightmares.
In all likelihood the ad industry will wait until next year to really crank things up; we'll be two years removed from Janet Jackson by then, and once again hungry for fart jokes and celebrity degradation. But until they get back on track, the Super Bowl will only ever be what it was this year -- a hell of a football contest. Gosh, what a shame, when the only thing to watch is the game.
