The 2009 Super Bowl Ads: Oh Brother
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.
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