Super Bowl or Yawn Bowl 2008

How many bloggers do you think are posting similar text about the ads that ran during the Super Bowl last night?

I must admit, I was surprised this morning that the Ad Age Daily Email news didn’t mention anything about the Super Bowl ads.

Maybe they had the same reaction to them as I did.

Unlike the independent bloggers, if Ad Age made any mention it would almost be like an Aunt saying bad things about her sister’s children.

Kind of like Wall Street. Last year the ads were fair. This year, I think they were worse.

The one Coke ad, the Planters Peanuts ad and the Tide ad were maybe the best.

The Coke ad featured balloon characters you see in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Charlie Brown rises up from behind one of the Manhattan hi-rises and ends up with the bottle of Coke.

It was fun to see Charlie Brown finally win.

The Planters Peanuts ad linked the peanuts with the male drive for a woman. The positive thinking part of me says that the creative writing the ad was inspired by her cat craving the catnip. Another part of me is thinking it might be the same copywriter that just completed the last Viagra ad.

I would even bet a buck or two that a combination of the MBA brand managers and their therapists scripted the Tide ad. The ad tapped right into the consumer experience versus the product story and its attributes.

Now post its re-birth experience, P&G gets it.

The Bridgestone ads were pretty good too. At least Bridgestone was creative enough to divert from the safety claim and bouncing babies of the competition.

What was bad about the rest is that both Client and Agency management were way too involved.

Creativity was expressed through either slapstick-backroom humor or “let’s see how much techno-movie graphics we can use” formatting.

The Budweiser ads were great examples of the slap-stick humor. All the ads were “been-there-done-that” extensions of past ads. Even the ad featuring their Clydesdale horses fits in that mold.

Most of the clients that I work with are ready to shoot a new ad before the current ones even hit the air.

Those Bud Boys cling to their ads like Linus clinging to the blanket.

I think that the Career-Builder execs and agency teams must hang out at the same beer pub with the Budweiser guys.

The GMC Yukon Hybrid Brand Manager and the agency creative team must write their ads in more than just the “standard pub room” smoke.

The Dell folks might want to consider joint therapy sessions with Wal*Mart. Seems both have no problems just ripping off the same ads that their smarter competitors created (i.e. Apple and Target).

Then you wonder if Geico and SoBe Life Water teams are merging together. Maybe Geico is leasing out the lizards and trying to recoup some of the investment in the Cavemen since their show got canceled.

“Birds of a feather flock together.”

The real Super Bowl game really took place in the last 3 minutes on the clock. The other 95% of the game was actually kind of boring.

The same is actually true about the television commercials.

Some say that more people watch the SuperBowl to watch the commercials versus the football game itself.

Maybe the programming group at Fox should take the client and agency management teams on an African safari in 2009 while some of the same folks that are doing cool stuff on YouTube take over as the creative teams to film next year’s Super Bowl spots.