Superbowl-ads.com Article Archive

According to an independent report from enterprise Web analytics provider Omniture, the worm’s most significant effect was a 9 percent decrease in traffic over a one-hour period Saturday. Sunday, traffic dipped by about 21 percent in each half of the game.

To top it all off, some advertisers didn’t have back ends in place to support their advertising efforts, resulting in forced time outs for many angry users. Surprisingly, Cadillac and Philip Morris had the most problems, as reported by users. Sony, FedEx, Levi’s, and McDonald’s were seamless, according to Keynote, a Web performance testing company.

It wasn’t a night for Metamucil ads.

The commercials on Sunday’s ABC telecast of the Super Bowl took aim at young – mostly football-loving – men with a mixture of spots for beer, soda pop, sports cars, and action-themed movies.

Each slickly-produced 30-second commercial set advertisers back upwards of $2.2 million. It was a bargain, many said, since they reached about 130 million viewers.

Unlike the game itself, there was no clear-cut winner among Madison Avenue’s offerings that aired during Sunday’s Super Bowl, if the polls are any indication.

In fact, advertisers’ efforts seemed to be so ho-hum that even the students in Andrew Bergstein’s marketing classes at Penn State University were unwilling to discuss them.

“It was like pulling teeth to get students to talk about their favorite Super Bowl ads, which was radically different from previous years,” said Bergstein, an instructor at the university’s Smeal College of Business.

Super Bowl? Super Mall. Commercials have become so prominent a part of the annual January rite that a commercial for America Online during this year’s game advised viewers that they could run to the Internet after play ended and “replay all your favorite Super Bowl commercials.”

In terms of production, the commercials generally were not lavish and most didn’t look outrageously costly.

Action. Beer. Celebrities.

Advertisers sang their ABC’s at this year’s Super Bowl, dishing up pitches that were textbook and familiar.

“What if you gave a Super Bowl and no advertiser came?” asked Steve Koluskus, creative director at Extra Strength Creative Group.

“I see no new campaigns, no new ideas,” said David Schiedt, creative director for Italia Denver.

Timing was everything for Budweiser’s ad featuring Clydesdale horses. A zebra, officiating a football game between the horses, views a replay of the game. Coincidentally, the next play in the real game was challenged, and the official went to the replay booth.

The Super Bowl game itself is usually anticlimactic, as was last night’s rollover, which left us wondering who brought the bigger choker to San Diego: Shania Twain or Al Davis? But long after we’ve forgotten the final score, we’ll remember the TV commercials. In fact, a recent survey concluded that 40 percent of us watch the game primarily to see the ads.

The year’s biggest TV event is also a glorious, high-stakes showcase for Madison Avenue.

The big game is over and it was not a super night for Oakland Raiders fans or for the commercials that aired during the Super Bowl. As the Tampa Bay Buccaneers dominated the game with a fierce defense, Madison Avenue played it safe, going for laughs with sophomoric sight gags and sitcom stars of the past.

WHERE WAS THE Ol’ razzle-dazzle? The Super Bowl, with its expected audience of more than 100 million viewers in the U.S., is the hottest ticket of the year for big-name advertisers, but this year’s parade of commercials could have used more flash and sparkle.

What did the experts think of this year’s Super Bowl commercials? In a word, eh.

The not-great, not-bad consensus came from Michigan State University’s advertising faculty, which gathered Sunday for its sixth annual review of the top ads.

The professors — Bill Ward, Bonnie Reece and Bruce Vanden Bergh, among others — gave good grades to Anheuser-Busch and Pepsi for doing their usual solid job. But in general, the MSU crowd wasn’t wowed by what it saw.

  monster.com – Their ad against trucking stinks.   ———————————————————————————   Response from a fan who has watched all televised super bowl games. This is by far the worst and most ill conceived ad campaign ever. The ads are more disappointing than the game.   ———————————————————————————   As a Professional truck driver for the past [...]

  More from our readers….   ———————————————————————————   Dreadlock Dog was my favorite. It was not on the list. So Funny! I came into the office talking about it this morning.   ———————————————————————————   I liked the Zebra Ad   ———————————————————————————   The top 5 were: 1) The 2 guys working out in the gym [...]

If Super Bowl ads express the collective male mood, then this year they were like a monosyllabic grunt. Pepsi traded Britney for Ozzy. Honda featured boys who didn’t but said they did. Chrysler — in a move apparently calculated to have the same effect as thinking about baseball — featured Celine Dion driving a big, van-like thing and singing. Dodge wooed us with a close-up of regurgitated beef jerky. Anheuser-Busch achieved near-hegemony with a series of disjointed ads that ranged from gross to goofy to glazed and defeated. Aside from Coors’ suggestion that everybody just fast-forward to the booby portion of the familiar “twins” ad (and remember to thank the remote), sex was mostly just that thing blocking the TV.

Someone figured Super Bowl XXXVII would be a blowout.

The NFL championship game was more competitive during the station breaks than on the field. Advertisers seemed prepared for a lopsided final score, as most of the attention-getting productions came in the first half.

Some huge companies, such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, took a pass on paying upward of $2 million for 30 seconds of air time. In stark contrast, Budweiser committed $23.1 million for 5 1/2 minutes.

Without further adieu, let’s award touchdowns — and toss penalty flags.

Reebok Co. said Monday the $4 million it spent to broadcast its 60-second “Terry Tate: Office Linebacker” commercial during the Super Bowl was worth every penny.

The Canton-based footwear and apparel company said downloads of an expanded version of the commercial — which fared well in a number of relatively unscientific polls published Monday in which viewers were asked to rank commercials — were running three per second and totaled 140,000 by noon on Monday.

In the end it was all about the football.

How else to account for the record number of viewers who tuned in to Super Bowl XXXVII Sunday night? It certainly wasn’t for the hip musical guests or clever commercial spots, both of which were in short supply.

Nope, the evening’s big winners were the Tampa Bay Bucaneers, who trounced the Oakland Raiders 48-21, and ABC, which scored a ratings touchdown. An estimated 137.7 million pigskin fans plugged in to the Alphabet net for at least some portion of the game, according to preliminary Nielsen Media Research.

This lopsided Super Bowl had the second-most TV viewers in NFL title game history: 137.65 million.

ABC’s telecast of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ 48-21 victory over the Oakland Raiders on Sunday registered a national rating of 40.7 — 1 percent higher than last year and the best since 2000.

That means an average of 40.7 percent of the country’s TV homes were watching at any given moment.