With advertising inventory reportedly still available a recently as a week ago, the 2009 Super Bowl ads threatened to be a mediocre lot at best. Rumors of Cash4Gold buying a spot prompted thoughts of a text-over-stock-photo 500 dollar production running in a million dollar time slot.

Advertisements were indeed bland. It’s kind of shameful when the network bumpers are better than the actual commercials. “If your Conan last longer than 3 hours..call a doctor.” -Tina Fey.

Continuing our tradition of pointing out puzzling Super Bowl commercial themes, we present the following oddities (video provided by Hulu, so not available outside the U.S., my apologies):

Smashing through glass or other structures

Used by:
Bud Light
Bud Light again
Doritos
Pedigree campaign

Wealthy African Americans and Bling / Gold

Used by:
Overstock
Cash4Gold
Career Builder

The smashing through glass and buildings meme just seems coincidental, like the slapstick fad last year, or the talking animal Super Bowl fad of the year before.

The bling meme sticks out like a sore thumb when you watch the ads back to back. The Overstock ad isn’t really offensive. It’s curious though that the other commercials makers would still push the line and endanger being accused of using offensive stereotypes.

This isn’t overreacting if you will recall the tragic story of Just for Feet’s Super Bowl ad that allegedly killed their business. These businesses are potentially one slow news cycle away from some bad press.

Tomorrow we’ll post our most hated ad of the Super Bowl this year.

Click here to see yon video

With some time to digest on the 2008 Super Bowl Ads and sober up, I think it’s clear that another horrible hive-mind theme has emerged on the day some in the industry call ‘the Super Bowl of advertising’. Last year the airwaves were rife with talking animals, (an observation which pissed off, of all people, the California Cheese Council, go figure. I have framed your cease and desist letter guys, it helps motivate me when times are bad).

But this year the offensive theme is something not quite as bad: good old all American racism.

Sales Genie has to take the cake with their ads calling out Indians and Chinese for having hilarious accents, lots of kids, and bad grammar. (Click here for the first ad, click here for the second).

Personally I think there’s nothing blatantly offensive about this kind of humor, where I think they make a giant blunder is that they were most certainly trying to appeal to business owners and sales people specifically in these two nationalities. What better way to appeal to your potential customers than to completely and utterly mock them.

(Oh there is more…)

Taco Bell Talking LionsSuper Bowl XLI Commercial

This year there must have been some traveling CGI salesman who convinced all the advertisers that talking animals was going to be the “in” thing during the Super Bowl.

I already took a look at Bud Light’s talking gorillas. They are rejoined by several other enchanted animals, first up are the Taco Bell lions.

For a Taco Bell commercial, this is a little above average. For commercials in general, it’s below average. (But it’s Taco Bell, who cares.

The effects on the lions, similar to the CGI Bud Light gorillas, are a little more sophisticated than the little wiggling mouths that used to adorn all the special effects talking beasties. You have some better mouth / eye movements, and cohesive facial reactions. Despite all this the lions, like the gorillas, come off soulless and fake. I agree with Gore Verbinski, director of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, who preaches that “CGI” is not a verb. Computer graphics isn’t a magic wand that will make a production look awesome, or replace the need for brick-and-mortar special effects.

Blockbuster Mouse ClickingSuper Bowl XLI Commercial

That said, I’d much rather see the entire animal stylized in CGI, as we see in this commercial for Blockbusters. Some hamsters or something are clicking on a mouse and torturing it to death. It might actually die off screen, I don’t know, I had the sound turned down.

This spot was much funnier and engaging to me than the gorillas or lions, and the animals aren’t presented as completely photo-realistic. The ability to completely control the characters and breathe life into them makes up for the “hey that’s a real lion talking” wow factor.

Comcast Talking TurtlesSuper Bowl XLI Commercial

Normally I’d advocate using puppetry over CGI wherever possible. Until I saw this stinker from the current Comcast campaign.

The talking turtles kind of look like petrified stool samples, and I found myself generally annoyed by this spot. Maybe by the time I saw it I was so fed up with talking animals this one just didn’t stand a chance.

I think they spent four dollars making these puppets. And part of their budget went into buying a three-dollar cup of Starbucks coffee. They must have made one puppet and split-screened it to save money. Anyway, whatever, I am so over the talking turtles. They are dead to me.

Bud Beach Crabs Super Bowl XLI Commercial

I thought I would dedicate a separate Super Bowl 2007 post just for the Budweiser ads. Bud Light usually has a good showing during Super Bowls, and brought some of the funnier moments to this Super Bowl’s commercial breaks.

This first ad for vanilla Budweiser, the forgotten cousin of Bud Light, could have been an ad for Coca Cola. It was generally unoffending and totally cute and heart-warming. It made me want to snuggle with beach crabs and love them.

So, of course, since my heart if full of evil, I hated it. Let’s move on.

Bud Light Talking Gorillas Super Bowl XLI Commercial

By the time the Super Bowl was over, I was tired of talking animals. Talking gorillas, Taco Bell’s talking lions, talking Hamsters clicking on talking mice, talking cows talking to talking bulls, my neighbor’s talking dog that tells me to shoot people. Enough, all of you! Get out of my head!

Aside from this pervasive theme, the ad was relatively funny. Version 2.0 talking animal commercials seem to have more flexibility with facial reactions, but still have that wispy, not-real-at-all quality that drives young minds into existential despair. (Stay in school)

Bud Light Smacking Super Bowl XLI Commercial

I declare this the best Bud Light commercial of the Super Bowl. I think slap-stick is a lazy way to get a sure laugh, but repeating it over and over can have a strange transcedence effect, whereby seeing the same joke over and over actually makes it funnier (exercise caution, do not attempt unsupervised).

This “smack” ad pulls off the concept with some snappy editing and through not respecting physical space of other individuals.

Bud Light Axe Man Super Bowl XLI Commercial

I like this ad because it really relates to someone like myself who does a lot of hitchhiking and is tired of being discriminated against just because I’m carrying an axe. Bud Light doesn’t just entertain with this commercial, it teaches us an after-school-special lesson about the dangerous pitfalls of an ugly little word called prejudice.

Bud Light Wedding Auctioneer Super Bowl XLI Commercial

Bud Light has some strange theme obsession with commercials featuring men at weddings, during which the men get together and totally man everything up right. Fruity-tootie ice sculpture? Well we carved it down into a penis. Are you going to make us wear a tuxedo? Well we’re going to be drunk during the ceremony.

There’s nothing funny about an auctioneer at a wedding because by the time the thing is over you have no idea what you have bought and all your bids were legally binding. I can’t say anymore because of the pending legal action against me by Watercrest Auctionhouse of Old London.

Bud Light ESL Super Bowl XLI Commercial

Bud Light made fun of people with hilarious accents in this Super Bowl ad featuring a renegade night school English instructor, drunk on his own sense of what is right and wrong. And also drunk on beer.

I guess I could see this commercial as potentially being offensive, though I have to admit the Indian accent is one of the most hilarious accents out there. I guess I’ll look the other way on this one.

Bud Light Paper Rock Scissors Super Bowl XLI Commercial

I might have liked this last Super Bowl ad a little more if it didn’t appear to be a clone of this Sprint ad from last year’s Super Bowl.

Also, not to nit-pick, but this isn’t how you’re supposed to play Paper Rock Scissors. Someone could get really hurt.

Bud Light made a pretty good showing this year, not just for the number of ads they bought, but for the amount of entertainment and originality in (most) every ad. I can’t remember seeing a single repeat from the company during the game which is always a positive.

:30 godaddy.com spot, @ 1 MB

Some people call the Super Bowl the Oscars of the ad industry. Not me though, it’s other people who say that.

There wasn’t a commercial that stood out as fantastic for me this year, but you can’t really expect that every year. There were a few good funny ones, including the two McDonald’s spots and the CareerBuilder spot. Man I love chimps.

But for the most part the spots were disappointing. A lot were good, but not great. The main theme seemed to be self-reference, which even if done right I tend to think is a bad idea. It can date the commercial or make it too inside-jokey, and usually seems like a short cut around creativity.

At the top of the list is the godaddy.com Janet Jackson spoof. It’s well done and pretty funny, but a lot of the punch of the humor relies on the scandal of the Super Bowl half time show of last year. Otherwise this still gets an A minus because I am grading on a curve. And I can be bought off with beer. The link to the video is below the still frame image.

:45 FedEx spot, @ 1.75 MB

And then a bear kicks Burt Reynolds square in his junk.

“FedEx is determined to have the best commercial on the Super Bowl,” the narrator says. “So we hired Old Navy to do our commercial!” The spot is sort of amusing, but there’s more of the same self-awareness in this spot as the previous one. They set out to make an ad to go on the Super Bowl and didn’t set out to make a really great ad and it’s pretty obvious. Also their commentaries on the previous Super Bowl commercials really aren’t that savvy. There are a lot of talking animals in commercials, but I’m not sure if they were really dead-on in their research. A groin kick? I think at some point they started watching America’s Funniest Video and mixed it up with previous Super Bowl Commercials, because I can’t think of a single recent Super Bowl commercial that featured a groin kick.

I wonder if this would have been better with the narrator reading the points that popped up on screen.

Oh well. Uh, B plus if you throw in a cookie for free with the meal deal. Otherwise B minus. The link to the video is below the exciting still frame.

:30 Bud spot, @ 1 MB

This ad continues to build my case against the theme of bringing up the Super Bowl in the Super Bowl ads themselves. And it’s pretty terrible as well.

The message is..drink Bud Light and break into your friend’s apartment..and sleep with his woman and send him the pictures? Well, ok, if Bud Light told me to, I guess it’s ok..

The link to the video is below the picture.

:30 MBNA spot, @ 1 MB

And another Super Bowl ad that mentions million dollar commercials in the script is what we have here in this commercial for MBNA. It’s atrocious and doesn’t make any sense, and they just throw in Gladys Knight for some weird reason. Maybe the British will understand this better than me.

:30 American Idol promo, @ 1 MB

Perhaps the most obnoxious things on TV during the Super Bowl are the ads, bumpers and promos Fox puts on to promote their network and upcoming shows. Did they just shoot these an hour before they had to go on? Who could blame them, it’s not like they had like a year to get ready.

This promo for American Idol is just stinky.

Well with these spots “tackled” (get it? tackled?) I’ll take a “half time” and come back later this week with the non self-referential ads that completely under whelmed me. And now to nurse my “hangover”!