Crosstalk The highs and lows of this year’s Super Bowl ads

Scott: Among our nerdy, sports-hating friends, critiquing the Super Bowl ads has become an annual ritual second only to Puppy Bowl in staving off the boredom of actually having to watch football. It’s also a fascinating bellwether—not just of the state of broadcast advertising, but of the where the culture is at in general. These commercials are ambitious and creatively diverse—and just as often out-of-touch and regressive—but they also reflect our fantasies and wild aspirations, like, say, being buried alive in a casket full of Doritos. What are your thoughts on this year’s crop? 

Noel: Let me start by naming a few of my favorites. I thought the Snickers ad that positioned Betty White and Abe Vigoda as the living embodiment of human weakness coasted by on goodwill towards those actors, but I still really enjoyed hearing White grumble, “They’ve been riding me all day.” 

The Kia Sorento ad with giant toys partying in Vegas packed a half-dozen great visual gags into a minute: a sock monkey getting a knit tattoo, a robot doing The Robot, Muno from Yo Gabba Gabba shattering bowling pins, and so on. I’m not sure who directed, but the commercial reminded me a little of Spike Jonze in the way it made the ridiculous look real. Dig that sock monkey on the JetSki!

And I know some people were underwhelmed by Google’s “Search On” ad, but I liked it for many of the same reasons that others didn’t. Yes, it tells people what they already know—that you can use Google to search for information you might need—but it does so in a way that reflects the way people really use the service. The misspellings, the suggested and related searches… This commercial is clearly designed to generate a warm feeling towards a common experience, and I thought it was very successful. Plus, the surprise ending is very sweet.

Scott: The Snickers spot was a definite winner, despite my general dubiousness at seeing brittle-boned oldies tackled for our edification. (I’m looking at you, Tim Tebow.) I can see the line “You’re playing like Betty White out there” getting some currency among sporting types, and I thought the twist of having a second, energy-depleted oldie in the form of the very-much-alive Abe Vigoda was a nice touch. This was maybe the only jokey commercial that worked for me, despite the frequent efforts of Doritos and Bud Light. I’m with you on the Kia Sorento ad, too, which avoided the bland car-porn of the Jeff Bridges-narrated Hyundai Sonata spots in favor of a propulsive, exciting, action-packed minute that made the car seem like a delivery system for fun. (Though having just read Randall Rothenberg’s excellent book Where The Suckers Moon, about the failed attempt to rework Subaru of America’s image, I wonder if the Kia spot might be too clever for its own good. A brilliant ad campaign does not always sell cars.) And who were these fools underwhelmed by the Google ad? The computer-savvy among us—those who have heard of an invention called the Internet, basically—probably already know how Google works, but pretending for a second that we don’t, the ad makes an awfully effective (and affecting) enticement for the reasons you mention. The evolution of the story was simple, compelling, and sweet while outlining some basic Google functions—the suggested search terms, the corrected misspellings, Google Maps, et al. Now if only the company can produce a minute explaining to me what the hell Google Wave is all about, I’ll be really impressed. 

From the top to the near-bottom, Bud Light took advantage of the four-for-the-price-of-three bulk ad-buy CBS appeared to be offering (see also: Doritos), debuting a quartet of unfunny funny commercials that leaned heavily on standard beer-ad tropes. In short: Beer as liquid testosterone, an elixir that brings men together (in a non-sexual way) and puts women in their place. A Wonka-like house made entirely of beer cans? Like heaven on earth, and it’s environmentally unfriendly, too! The girlfriend’s book club? That classic of Western literature can be my coaster—and hey you over there, you’re quite the looker!

Of the four, the one about astronomers spotting a fiery asteroid plummeting toward Earth got the closest to a mild theoretical chuckle out of me, in part because its take on imminent apocalypse is refreshingly light-hearted and in part because even when facing their doom, everyone is still reaching for watered-down light beer.

The T-Pain spot struck me as painfully behind the times, given how the Auto-Tune thing is played out both as a creative phenomenon and as Internet parody (e.g. Auto-Tune The News, which also featured a cameo by T-Pain). Add to that the general “Wassup” vibe of dudes talking to each other via split-screen, and it earns negative points for creativity.

On the other hand, maybe I should question my long-running assumption that advertising types are supposed to be on the cutting edge of trends. As Mad Men has shown us, it’s very often the other way around—and that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s less effective as advertising.

Noel: Since you don’t watch Lost, you missed the key element of the “observatory” spot: the appearance of everyone’s favorite multi-named Dharma Initiative scientist Marvin Candle. And I have to admit that I chuckled at the Auto-Tune bit, even though it was hardly cutting-edge. But you’re not being hard enough on the “book club” ad, which continues Budweiser’s long history of depicting anything even remotely cultural as wimpy chick stuff, largely intolerable unless there’s plenty of cold beer around.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that the general response to this year’s Super Bowl commercials will be mild-to-strong disgust over how anti-woman so many of them were. I know it’s the norm for ads during sporting events to play up how “man time” is sacred and “woman time” is lame, but I’ve rarely seen that theme take such a hostile turn. I’m not sure which of this bad lot was worse: The Dodge Charger ad where a succession of miserable-looking men acquiesce to cleaning up after themselves and “watching your vampire TV shows with you” in exchange for being allowed to drive a bitchin’ car?

Or maybe Jim Nantz demanding that a spineless schlub “change out of that skirt” and buy a FloTV so that he can watch the game while accompanying his woman on errands?

Leaving aside my longstanding annoyance at any journalist—even a sports journalist—serving as paid pitchman, I just don’t understand how spending time with women has become such a soul-crushing burden for men. TiVo the damn game and watch your lady try on clothes for an hour. Who knows? You might even get to see her naked and stuff.

In the end though, I’m going to pin The Misogyny Badge Of Shame on Bridgestone’s “Your tires or your life” ad, which is set in some post-apocalyptic battle zone where a hard-of-hearing man would rather hang onto his wheels than his woman. Even worse? The band of marauders he encounters are equally disgusted at the idea of being saddled with a hot babe in a sleeveless leather catsuit.

In this atmosphere, the epic “Boys rule!” commercial for Dove For Men was practically a beacon of enlightenment. It may not have been as quirky as the similar “look how cool a dude can be” Cars.com ad, but at least Dove encouraged men to embrace their vanity and clean themselves up a little. That’s… progress?

Scott: The misogyny in this year’s crop was pretty intense, and always of the same spirit: that women are demanding killjoys and every second spent away from them is a chance to taste the sweet nectar of freedom. (And I apologize for not seeming as repulsed by the Bud Light book club ad than I was; it’s sad that we’re supposed to identify with the boorish twit who uses Little Women as a coaster.) That Bridgestone ad is pretty gross, too, but there’s something profoundly creepy about the Dodge Charger spot, which was like American Psycho with Patrick Bateman standing in for the emasculated everyman. Are men the only people who buy cars? And would buying a Dodge Charger be a unilateral decision? (Typical response to the ad on my Twitter feed, from progressive activist Shaunna Thomas: “Dodge Charger. Because women can go fuck themselves.”) 

Poor Doritos. Another massive four-spot ad-buy, but a resounding 0 for 4 on scoring on their one-joke premises. And commercials like these are not the kind that reveal more on repeat viewings; if they don’t work on Super Bowl Sunday, when we’re sucking down Bud Lights and paying keener attention to commercials than at any point in the year, they’re certainly not going to play when we’re nursing hangovers the next day. The first one breaks a cardinal rule for me: If a commercial features children or animals doing things that children or animals are incapable of doing without the help of a computer, I’m almost certain to hate it. So having a dog remove its own anti-barking shock collar and attach it to a Doritos-munching human wouldn’t have been funny to me, even if I couldn’t see the punchline coming immediately.

Though there’s something novel about the premise of the second spot—little boy screening dates for his single mother—the cartoon slap was more lowest common denominator stupidity. (Side issue: Gratuitous violence was the order of the day in this batch of Super Bowl commercials. But I’ll get to that later with the Tim Tebow ad.) The “Tim’s Locker” spot finally seized on Doritos’ sharp, tri-cornered chip for a ninja joke, but the prospect of stealing a bag of chips from a guy’s gym locker doesn’t seem that appealing in the first place, does it? 

That said, the “Buried Alive” segment was perhaps my guilty pleasure of the night, because the concept is so profoundly stupid that it made me laugh. It’s all there in the dialogue (“At least he got his dying wish.” “A jumbo casket full of Doritos.”), which articulates a fantasy so gloriously banal that it wouldn’t be out of place in a Mike Judge movie. But alas, this isn’t a satire of consumerist junk, but a commercial about junk to consume, so the punchline was destined to undermine the premise. 

Noel: I can’t say that I found any of the Doritos spots funny, even incidentally. Each year, the Super Bowl introduces a slate of ads that we’re going to be seeing for the next several months. Do you really think the casket bit will still be amusing by the time March Madness rolls around?

And here’s another question: What CBS advertising exec approved running two consecutive ads featuring pantslessness?

The decision might not have been so bad if both ads weren’t so dopey. I’m not sure I get the point of pitching Dockers by having a chorus of schlubs sing a catchy song about not wearing pants. Seems self-defeating. And the Careerbuilder ad kind of underscores what I was saying above about the Google spot. Google deals with how people really use Google, while Careerbuilder offers a scenario I’ve never seen in the real world. Do people really want to change jobs because of casual Friday? (Even an extreme version of casual Friday?) The Careerbuilder ad smacks of some copywriter looking for gags about office life, and settling on some low-hanging, not-that-ripe fruit. In this economy especially, surely Careerbuilder can find some more persuasive way to get people to try their service.