The Extratextuals

I’m not the only one who thought the Super Bowl ads were pretty crappy this year – it seems to be a widely echoed opinion. That said, I’ve often disliked them. Ads are already showy and always verging on being hyper-annoying in their “hey, look at me”-ness, so the added expectations and hype around the Super Bowl usually drives them over the edge. If regular ads have bad stereotypes and stupid humor, Super Bowl ads frequently have horrific stereotypes and brain-numbingly stupid humor. Moreover, precisely because Super Bowl ads usually represent some form of new campaign, many of them tout a rebranding, and after watching 3 or 4 products or services insist that they’re completely different, when I know they’re the same products or services, each successive ad’s echoing of the same sentiment proves to be patronizing.

The best ads are great precisely because they rise out of an ad break of seemingly no consequence. Super Bowl ads come with the imprimatur of supposed brilliance, though, which means that the expectations are nearly always too high for them to meet.

Nevertheless, several ads clearly rose to the top or sunk to the bottom, and I thought I’d share my evaluations of these two categories.

The Ads I Liked

1. Coke: “Heist.” Nice CGI, and it works well alongside Coke’s brilliant GTA parody and their other Super Bowl offering, “Strangers,” and their excellent “Magic Factory” ad to align Coke with the magic make-believe of animation, videogames, and happy transformational experiences. The butterflies’ mock Coke bottle is a particularly nice touch.

2. Hulu. Alec Baldwin is great in this wonderful, tongue-in-cheek play with the bonehead idea that TV melts your brain. Funny and something a TV scholar can get behind: always a good mix.

3. Bud: “Horse Love.” Okay, so it’s kind of trite, and I’m sure I’ve seen versions of this before. But it made me laugh and it was cute parody. The other volumes in the story weren’t as amusing, but this one hit the spot.

4. Monster.com: “Moose.” A very simple concept that in many other advertisers’ hands (particularly this year) would’ve been drawn out ad infinitum like the requisite bad joke that gets five minutes of play each episode of Family Guy, but here was quick and to the point. Probably only amusing on first viewing, but effective on that viewing.

Also okay were, as said, Coke’s “Strangers,” Pedigree’s “Adoption” ad, Priceline (I’m a sucker for Shatner’s antics, even when through someone else), and the Doritos “Crystal Ball” vending machine gag was funny.

Those That Really Sucked

Hmm, where do we start? How about at the very bottom:

1. Godaddy, “Enhanced.” When ads are meant to be spending big money and going big concept, what’s with the porn aesthetic? This ad is so painfully stupid, not even funny, since the comic timing drags. So all the ad ends up resting on is, tee hee, double entendre about, tee hee, women’s breasts. If especially moronic twelve year-old boys made ads, they’d all look like this.

2. Godaddy, “Shower.” Admittedly, Godaddy didn’t let the twelve year-olds do this one. Instead, they gave their fourteen year-old brothers ten minutes in a locker room to make this one up. We still haven’t moved beyond, tee hee, women’s breasts, but now we’re dreaming about how we can watch them online with our friends. First, that’s regression, nor progression; second, dude, you wanna watch porn with your friends? This ad is so bad that you don’t even need to mention the objectification of women to damn it (though once you do mention it, its damnation seems yet more justified).

3. Pepsi, “MacGruber.” MacGruber is the anti-Fey/Palin sketch: an example of how bad and how completely unfunny SNL can be, especially when they think they’re funny and keep going back to the same very tainted well. Continuing with the above theme, MacGruber seems to be penned by a four your-old, who thinks that saying something unfunny multiple times makes it funnier. So what’s next? MacGruber with Swiffer? MacGruber with Spaghetti Factory? At least when it’s on SNL, I can avoid it; when it’s an ad, it can haunt me. (Shudders at thought of future torment).

4. Hyundai: “Global Domination.” Simple concept: cut between scenes of Germans yelling and Japanese people yelling. Nice to see we’ve advanced beyond WW2 stereotypes of Germans and Japanese.

5. Bridgestone: “Potatoheads.” Lest Godaddy win the Really Bad Gender Coding MVP Award uncontested, Bridgestone thought it would be funny for Mr. Potatohead to smack Mrs. Potatohead’s mouth off because she won’t stop nagging him. One of these days, Alice, huh? How charming. And this show of beating your wife is meant to make me want to buy tires how?

So many more were bad or simply boring. I’m particularly sad to see John Turturro in a lame ad for Heineken: Turturro’s better than this, and either his agent deserves to be fired for convincing him he’s not, Hollywood needs a stern finger wag for not giving him decent roles that would pay him better, or he and I need to go have a chat. From Barton Fink to this?

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