Today is the annual “Monday Morning Quarterbacking of Super Bowl Commercials” day. And unlike many years, the football game was better than the commercials. The Drew vs. Peyton battle was great. Most of the commercials, not so great.
Here are my picks for Best, Worst, Underrated and “What were they thinking?” commercials.
Best: Snickers. The spot was attention-getting, humorous and most important, a great statement of the company’s brand proposition. I remembered it this morning and I associated the message with something relevant to me as a consumer. Well done, Snickers!
Worst: GoDaddy. The commercials were lame, degrading and have nothing positive to say about the brand. They make me want to do business with the company’s competitors. I know this is consistent with its previous efforts, but surely GoDaddy could do better.
Underrated: Google. I would have never expected that a 30-second demonstration of Google could be engaging, but this was masterfully done. It had the two essential ingredients of great story telling, one action leading to the next and a relevant message (more on this in an upcoming post). It made me feel something, which was quite unexpected. It might not be the highest-rated spot, but there are lessons to be learned from Google’s execution.
“What were they thinking?” Dove. After several years and millions of dollars positioning Dove as a beauty brand for women, now they want to launch Dove for Men. I’m usually less critical of brand extensions than Al Ries, but this one is a dangerous gamble for Dove. Surely, a new brand optimized for men could have achieved its goal of reaching a new market with much less downside for the company’s core business.
If you want to see how the Ad Meter scored all the Super Bowl ads, click here for the USA Today coverage. It turns out that the Ad Meter and I agree on the Best and the Worst commercial. But what do you think? What are your Best and Worst picks for Super Bowl 2010?
John Ellett is CEO of nFusion Group, LLC, a digitally-focused marketing agency based in Austin, TX. He has a passion for encouraging and supporting marketing leaders who have the courage to be change agents in their organizations.
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Man, the ads were almost uniformly awful. Snickers is probably the only one that got it right. (Thank goodness the game rocked.) what’s up with the repetitiveness of concept from campaign to campaign, and BACK TO BACK? Extraordinary lack of imagination or extraordinarily bad luck? (Or just plain bad?) Tackling old people: funny once, not in back to back ads. The use of “little people†— same thing (the Kiss/Dr. Pepper add followed by I don’t remember what …). Hate the e-Trade baby/ies. Not funny. Make Tim Tebow and his mom take them home. Forever.
While I too liked the Google ad, I am not sure exactly what they hoped to achieve. Surely they want to reinforce Google as “a part of your life”, but at this point, it seems like most people are already there mentally. Brand/Image advertising is certainly valuable and nothing new, but it was just jarring to see it coming from a company built entirely on the concept of measurable marketing objectives.