By Phil Rosenthal and Tribune Media Columnist

The chief executive of Chicago’s Cramer-Krasselt wasn’t monkeying around.

CEO Peter Krivkovich didn’t just drop the CareerBuilder.com advertising account in response to the job Web site putting the account up for review. Incensed at learning the review was spurred by the performance of CareerBuilder’s Super Bowl commercials in USA Today’s annual poll, Krivkovichtook the unusual step of writing an internal memo that tore apart the client his agency had spent the last five years building up.

“In our entire history, hell in the history of this crazy thing called advertising, I’m not sure there has ever been any thing as baseless or as unbelievable as that,” Krivkovich wrote in the memo, which was obtained by the Chicago Tribune and other media outlets. “It’s so ludicrous and they are so serious about that poll it’s almost funny.

“Being floored would be an understatement. We can proudly take credit for their success. … Despite all the great work and making them famous, their sole reason is, at best, unsophisticated, unbusiness like and from the standpoint of how to run a business, unprofessional. They may not be the kind of people we should do business with. Therefore we can’t justify any reason to participate in a review and have just notified them accordingly. … We’re moving on!”

A Cramer-Krasselt spokeswoman confirmed the authenticity of the memo but declined to elaborate.
A spokeswoman for Chicago-based CareerBuilder, jointly owned by USA Todayparent Gannett Co., Chicago Tribune parent Tribune Co. and McClatchy Co., would only confirm Cramer-Krasselt’s resignation and that the account is up for review.

With this year’s Super Bowl showcase, where CBS charged $2.6 million per30-second spot seen by an average of more than 90 million viewers, CareerBuilder turned its popular “Office Monkeys” campaign inside out. Rather than have a suffering office worker surrounded by monkeys, it placed officeworkers in the jungle. The company’s ads finished 16th, 27th and 28th out of57 spots tested by USA Today’s Ad Meter real-time consumer focus group.

CareerBuilder’s ads in the 2006 Super Bowl finished 12th and 13th in USAToday’s survey. Its Super Bowl commercials ranked Nos. 4, 5 and 6 in 2005.

During the five years Cramer-Krasselt has had the CareerBuilder account, the job site has gone from third in its category to surpassing Monster.com for first place in jobs posted, site traffic and revenue. Krivkovich’s memo says his firm helped drive up CareerBuilder traffic 43 percent and awareness by 64 percent even as Monster was outspending it.

Krivkovich also noted that, according to Nielsen, CareerBuilder enjoyed a 148 percent increase in site traffic after this year’s Super Bowl, the most of any advertiser in the telecast.

“To our amazement, to our total astonishment, all that astounding business success was less important than one poll,” Krivkovich wrote. “They wanted us to make them famous; we did that in spades. … But the TV ads did not make the top 10 in the USA Today poll–a poll that everyone knows doesn’t mirror results (see the continuing Bud sales decline for one!)–they just told us they will do a creative review.

“Wait a minute we said, what about the incredible growth that is going on, the shares, the revenue, the awareness, the two best internet sites ever, the massive buzz, etc, etc. What about all of that? That’s huge. `Yes,’ they responded, `but [Cramer-Krasselt] didn’t get the top ten in the USA Todaypoll.’ Hold on … we crushed every possible business metrics/barometer for success. Out of all the metrics and polls, it’s all about this one? You have to be … kidding, right!? `No, that’s it. It’s because of the poll.’ That was about the extent of the conversation.”

Apart from the Super Bowl, Cramer-Krasselt’s Monk-e-Mail viral effort, anonline marketing effort, was named best overall campaign of the year in tradepublication Adweek’s annual Buzz Awards last fall and was among the year’sbest and worst ads and other marketing gimmicks by The Wall Street Journal inDecember.
———-
 philrosenthal@tribune.com
via archives.chicagotribune.com

seattlepi.com

Gay rights groups complained content was homophobic

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

HACKETTSTOWN, N.J. — A commercial for Snickers candy bars launched during the Super Bowl broadcast Sunday was pulled after its maker got complaints that it was homophobic.

The ad showed two auto mechanics accidentally kissing while eating the same candy bar and then ripping out some chest hair to do something “manly.” One of the alternate endings on the Snickers Web site showed the men attacking each other.

The Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation complained to the maker of Snickers, Masterfoods USA, a division of Mars Inc.

The Snickers Web site also showed video of players from the Super Bowl teams reacting to the kiss.

“This type of jeering from professional sports figures at the sight of two men kissing fuels the kind of anti-gay bullying that haunts countless gay and lesbian schoolchildren on playgrounds all across the country,” Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese said in a statement.

Masterfoods spokeswoman Alice Nathanson said the company would stop running the ad on television and the Web site.

“We know that humor is highly subjective and understand that some people may have found the ad offensive. Clearly that was not our intent,” she wrote.

Ads Not So Super?Is the art of creating a creative Super Bowl ad lost? Corporate America spent about $85,000 per second of Super Bowl airtime, but many bloggers said most of the ads missed their mark.

Many bloggers were eager to weigh in with their lists of the funniest, dumbest and weirdest ads that aired during the big game. But Sarah Jean Snarker captured the overriding sentiment in the blogosphere that this year’s ads were “pretty snoozy.”

“We have once again been underwhelmed both by the game AND the ads that were supposed to be worth $2.6M/30-second slot. To be honest, I didn’t see ANY worth that much coin,” FairWeather Zealot adds. A blogger at It’s On My TV agrees. “I thought they all lacked that edginess we’ve seen in past years,” he writes.

“2007 was one of the worst years when it comes to Super Bowl ads. It seemed most companies either went the celeb or violence route, producing nothing near as powerful as Apple’s 1984 or as addictive as Budweiser’s Wassup,” YoungGoGetter.com blogs.

Not surprisingly, many bloggers enjoyed the commercial spots created by amateurs. One of the ads that bloggers gave high marks was the Doritos ad created by an amateur for a little over $12.

“This contest-winning gem was reportedly made for $12 bucks. Take that Madison Ave,” TampaBayBostonian blogs.

This year’s crop of Super Bowl ads was notable also because they were available almost immediately online as they aired on television. Along with many others, CBS Sportline posted new ads after every quarter, iFilm has a section devoted to the ads, and other sites let visitors vote on their favorite spots.

The online availability of the ads also caused its own problems, as people were able to consider the ads long after they aired on television. Snickers decided to withdraw their spot — featuring two men hurting themselves after they accidentally kiss while sharing a candy bar — from their Web site after Masterfoods received complaints from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Human Rights Campaign that the commercial was homophobic.

But Blake Synder says the ads merely play to what viewers want to see. “Why is it that the need to communicate an idea quickly forces storytellers — and that’s who creative ad execs are — to narrow their focus to the most primal conflicts and use the most basic emotions to get our attention?,” Synder blogs. “Because those primal ads work — instantly and perpetually. All storytellers should take note.”

If you haven’t had your fill of the ads, you can view them here.

via cbsnews.com

Anheuser-Busch scores points for some clever spots, but most ad critics think this year’s big commercials were underwhelming.

By Paul R. La Monica, CNNMoney.com editor at large

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Boring. Poorly executed. Unmemorable.

These words could not only be used to describe the action that took place on the football field during Super Bowl XLI Sunday night but also the uber-hyped commercials that aired during the big game.

Several advertising experts said Sunday night that, with a few exceptions, most of the commercials were disappointing. So it looks like many corporations may have wasted the $2.6 million that CBS (Charts) was said to be charging for 30 seconds of ad time.

“This was not a banner year for Super Bowl ads. Nothing really stood out,” said Steve McKee, president of McKee Wallwork Cleveland Advertising, an agency that runs Adbowl, a site that tracks opinions about Super Bowl commercials.

Most critics said that Budweiser brewer Anheuser-Busch (Charts), which aired ten spots, the most of any advertiser, fared the best. According to Adbowl, Anheuser-Busch had six of the ten best commercials, with its Rock Paper Scissors ad for Bud Light coming in first.

According to Spotbowl, another site where people can vote for their favorite Super Bowl commercials, five of the top ten Super Bowl ads were from Anheuser-Busch as of late Sunday night. The Rock Paper Scissors ad also topped this list.
Super Bowl ads through the ages
The company’s spots, which included an auctioneer conducting a wedding ceremony, a couple arguing about whether to pick up a hitchhiker with a Bud Light and an ax and comedian Carlos Mencia instructing a class of students learning English to say “No speak English” when asked for a Bud Light, also won raves from several ad professionals.

“Budweiser has done it again. They have this figured out,” said Tim Calkins, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Besides the Bud ads, experts said that video rental chain Blockbuster (Charts), which showed a rabbit and guinea pig trying to use a real mouse to get online, also had a successful commercial. The Blockbuster spot was the second-most popular commercial according to Adbowl and Spotbowl.

Doritos, which is owned by PepsiCo (Charts)’s Frito-Lay snack division, had two hits with user-generated commercials. Doritos asked average consumers to submit spots for the Super Bowl and after five finalists were selected, people voted online for their favorite.

The winning ad, featuring an accident prone couple, was shown shortly after the game began while another finalist, about an overly amorous checkout girl, aired later on during the game. The first Doritos ad finished in seventh in the Adbowl voting and was ninth on Spotbowl.com. They were both among the top ten most viewed commercials according to a release from digital video recorder company TiVo.

“Doritos was a big winner. Both ads scored well, especially since they were by amateurs,” said Walter Guarino, a professor of advertising at Seton Hall University.

General Motors’ (Charts) Chevy also aired a user-generated commercial, based on an idea from a college student from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. The spot showed a bunch of men tearing off their shirts and rushing to wash a Chevy that was driving through Manhattan with several women inside.

One expert said that since the user-generated ads were so well-received, this could lead to more companies looking to the average consumer, as opposed to Madison Avenue, for marketing ideas. Plus these ads could actually be cheaper to produce.

“If you did a blind test with consumers asking them to tell which were the agency-created ads and which were the consumer-created ads, I’m not sure many would know the difference,” said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer with Nielsen Buzz Metrics, which measures online buzz and consumer opinion at blogs and other Web sites.

But several other companies who have been known for creative commercials in the past did not deliver this year.

Spyro Kourtis, president of the Hacker Group, an ad agency based in Bellveue, Wash., said that CareerBuilder’s ads were disappointing. The online recruitment site had featured chimps as examples of bad co-workers in ads during the past few years but abandoned that campaign this year in favor of a jungle-themed group of spots.

Pepsi, which aired three ads for its Sierra Mist brand of drink, also did not fare well, according to critics.

Neither did FedEx (Charts), which had one of the most popular commercials last year showing a caveman getting in trouble for not using FedEx to ship a package. This year, the company had one commercial that took place on the moon and another one in an office where people had names that fit their personalities or behaviors.

Commercials from several first-time Super Bowl advertisers were also panned by experts, including spots for online sales lead generator Salesgenie.com, GPS navigation system Garmin and King Pharmaceuticals (Charts), which ran an ad for an American Heart Association Web site.

And critics said that most of the celebrity ads were flopped. Several experts panned a Revlon ad featuring musician Sheryl Crow. Michael Pavone, president of Pavone, a brand consulting firm in Harrisburg, Pa. that runs the Spotbowl site, called it “dreadful” and added that it seemed to go on for an hour and a half.

Seton Hall’s Guarino said Nationwide Insurance and Emerald Nuts also didn’t do a great job with their celebrity pitchmen. He said that it seemed like many older viewers hated the Nationwide ad, which featured Kevin Federline, aka K-Fed, who is best-known for his marriage to and pending divorce from pop star Britney Spears.

Meanwhile, Emerald used actor and singer Robert Goulet in its spot, which Guarino said was a celebrity who did not really resonate with younger viewers.

Nielsen’s Blackshaw said that advertisers did do a better job of promoting their Web sites in their commercials and that’s a positive as more and more younger viewers go online for entertainment. But he added that none of the commercials appeared to generating a huge amount of discussion online.

“Marketers showed more sophistication integrating the Internet into their campaigns but I wouldn’t say we saw off the chart buzz compared to previous years,” she said.

So at the end of the day, it seems that Super Bowl advertising, much like the game itself, had trouble living up to the advance billing.

“There’s so much hype now that it’s hard to top what you did last year,” said the Hacker Group’s Kourtis.

via money.cnn.com

By STUART ELLIOTT

No commercial that appeared last night during Super Bowl XLI directly addressed Iraq, unlike a patriotic spot for Budweiser beer that ran during the game two years ago. But the ongoing war seemed to linger just below the surface of many of this year’s commercials.

The Super Bowl Sideshow

Virginia Heffernan, The Times’s television critic, commented on the million-dollar ads, the weird diversions and Prince’s halftime spectacle.

Advertising: Amateurs’ Efforts Highlight Ad Bowl

More than a dozen spots celebrated violence in an exaggerated, cartoonlike vein that was intended to be humorous, but often came across as cruel or callous.

For instance, in a commercial for Bud Light beer, sold by Anheuser-Busch, one man beat the other at a game of rock, paper, scissors by throwing a rock at his opponent’s head.

In another Bud Light spot, face-slapping replaced fist-bumping as the cool way for people to show affection for one another. In a FedEx commercial, set on the moon, an astronaut was wiped out by a meteor. In a spot for Snickers candy, sold by Mars, two co-workers sought to prove their masculinity by tearing off patches of chest hair.

There was also a bank robbery (E*Trade Financial), fierce battles among office workers trapped in a jungle (CareerBuilder), menacing hitchhikers (Bud Light again) and a clash between a monster and a superhero reminiscent of a horror movie (Garmin).

It was as if Madison Avenue were channeling Doc in “West Side Story,” the gentle owner of the candy store in the neighborhood that the two street gangs, the Jets and Sharks, fight over. “Why do you kids live like there’s a war on?” Doc asks plaintively. (Well, Doc, this time, there is.)

During other wars, Madison Avenue has appealed to a yearning for peace. That was expressed in several Super Bowl spots evocative of “Hilltop,” the classic Coca-Cola commercial from 1971, when the Vietnam War divided a world that needed to be taught to sing in perfect harmony.

Coca-Cola borrowed pages from its own playbook with two whimsical spots for Coca-Cola Classic, “Happiness Factory” and “Video Game,” that were as sweet as they were upbeat. The commercials, by Wieden & Kennedy, provided a welcome counterpoint to the martial tone of the evening.

Those who wish the last four years of history had never happened could find solace in several commercials that used the device of ending an awful tale by revealing it was only a dream.

The best of the batch was a commercial for General Motors by Deutsch, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, in which a factory robot “obsessed about quality” imagined the dire outcome of making a mistake.

The same gag, turned inside out, accounted for one of the funniest spots, a Nationwide Financial commercial by TM Advertising, also owned by Interpublic. The spot began with the singer Kevin Federline as the prosperous star of an elaborate rap video clip. But viewers learned at the end it was only the dream of a forlorn fry cook at a fast-food joint.

Then, too, there was the unfortunate homonym at the heart of a commercial from Prudential Financial, titled “What Can a Rock Do?”

The problem with the spot, created internally at Prudential, was that whenever the announcer said, “a rock” — invoking the Prudential logo, the rock of Gibraltar — it sounded as if he were saying, yes, “Iraq.”

To be sure, sometimes “a rock” is just “a rock,” and someone who has watched the Super Bowl XIX years in a row only for the commercials may be inferring things that Madison Avenue never meant to imply.

Take for instance a spot by Grey Worldwide, part of the WPP Group, for Flomax, a drug sold by Boehringer Ingelheim to help men treat enlarged prostates.

“Here’s to men,” the announcer intoned, “to guys who want to spend more time having fun and less time in the men’s room.”

It was not difficult to imagine guests at noisy Super Bowl parties asking one another, “Did he just say, ‘guys who want to spend more time having fun in the men’s room?’ ”

Another off-putting moment was provided by a stereotyped character in a commercial by Endeavor for a hair dye, Revlon Colorist. He was described as the stylist for the singer Sheryl Crow, and he was clearly miffed about her using the product.

“Revlon? Color?” he asked, pouting and rolling his eyes. “I am the colorist.”

What follows is an assessment of some of the other high and low points among the commercials shown nationally during the game on CBS. The spots are among 36 provided to a reporter before the game, out of the total of about 56 that were scheduled to run.

ANHEUSER-BUSCH Each year, Anheuser-Busch manages to offset the typically coarse commercials for Bud Light with a charmer or two for its Budweiser brand. Last night, the brewer went two-for-two with a pair of spots about animals. One commercial tugged at the heartstrings with a bedraggled mutt whose wish to jump on the Bud band wagon — literally and figuratively — came true. The other, sillier spot presented a beachful of anthropomorphic crabs starting a Bud-centric version of a cargo cult. Agency: DDB Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group.

CADBURY SCHWEPPES A wry, low-key commercial showed an ardent fan of Snapple Green Tea, sold by Cadbury Schweppes, traveling all the way to China to learn the secret of its appeal. The punch line, that the answer was closer than he imagined, was not unexpected. Still, it was delivered deftly. Agency: Cliff Freeman & Partners, part of MDC Partners.

DIAMOND FOODS Mr. Federline was not the only celebrity to poke fun at his public persona. A wacky spot for the Emerald line of nuts sold by Diamond Foods presented the crooner Robert Goulet as a nefarious evil-doer. Perhaps he was auditioning for a role in the next Austin Powers movie — or to replace William Shatner in the Priceline campaign. Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, owned by Omnicom.

GODADDY Another Super Bowl, another cheesy commercial for GoDaddy, the Web site registrar operated by the GoDaddy Group. This time, there was a wild party in the office of the GoDaddy marketing department. “Everybody wants to work in marketing,” a character says with a smirk. Hey, GoDaddy, go get Mommy — maybe she knows how to make a halfway decent Super Bowl spot. Agency: created internally.

PEPSICO Two spots for Sierra Mist, sold by the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo, were not as funny as those from the game last year. A third commercial, for Sierra Mist Free, hit the jackpot with a punch line that, well, came up short, as in the abbreviated shorts worn by the comedian Jim Gaffigan. Agency: BBDO Worldwide, part of Omnicom.

SPRINT NEXTEL By now, even the most spoof-loving consumer is probably tired of commercials that mock commercials for prescription drugs. But a spot from Sprint Nextel managed to elicit laughs. The parody was dead-on, down to the hushed-voice announcer promising that Sprint Mobile Broadband would help those who “can’t take care of business the way others do” by curing their “connectile dysfunction.” Agency: Publicis & Hal Riney, part of the Publicis Groupe.

via nytimes.com

zagstudios.com

Five Star players and a Couple of Goats.

Like last year, the winner of this year’s Ad Super Bowl had to be Anheuser-Busch with five great spots and a few that were merely very good. A line from the “Classroom” spot gets our vote for Most likely to make it into popular vernacular: “Gimme a Bud Light, Feller.” This one was multicultural without being politically incorrect. Just fun. How many product mentions do they get into this spot? Nearly a dozen — and without being offensive. Brilliant.

 Another example of a star player was Bud Light’s “Axe” spot. This one was solidly in the vein of “True” comedy from start to finish. “I’m sure there’s a reason for it” is a savvy way of saying guys dismiss anything for a Bud Light. The spot gets even better when the guy actually stops and asks the hitchhiker about the axe. Of course, it’s a bottle opener. Great spot.

With the stray dog ad, Budweiser proves once again how well they can do regal noble and sweet just as well as comedy. A cute homeless pooch (having a very bad day) sees a wagon in a parade and the Dalmatian on board. He gets splashed with mud — instant spots — and gets to join the Bud parade with a cute wink to the other dog. This is a great example of how to do sweet right (are you listening, GM robot?).

The set-up for Bud Light’s “Rock Paper Scissors” really pays off well with the unexpected: one guy throws a rock. Of course, according to the rules, the guy who threw paper should have won. The low five at end is a nice touch, but wait: didn’t Sierra Mist do this exact concept in 2005? Even so, this one’s a winner.

E-trade had several good spots but the standout was “What you can do with one finger.” This one had the perfect VO, great editing, direction and camera angles PLUS it used fun choices as examples before the punch line. Even when it comes to telling your expensive broker where to go, all it takes is one finger. Entertaining, persuasive, and a good use of humor.

CareerBuilder: Work is a Jungle is a good visual metaphor, but the spots were a little uneven. In the best one, an arrow pierces a coffee cup and an office worker yells, “RUN! They’re looking for volunteers for a training seminar!” In another, office workers are fighting for a promotion. The tagline “A better job awaits” is compelling, and this campaign is close. It’s nice to see Career Builder trying to mature, but we’ll miss the monkeys and jackasses.

What’s the big controversy over Nationwide and K-Fed? It’s very funny and a great follow up to last year’s Fabio spot. Things CAN change overnight and Federline being self-deprecating enough to appear in this spot makes him infinitely more likeable.

“Karate Class” was the best of the Sierra Mist ads. Despite not feeling like their usual loose improv, the “beard combover” spot started well, but went a little too far with the cutoffs, making us question their decision on the ending. The Sierra Mist campaign based around the improvisational comedy troupe called the “Mist Takes” started in 2005 and is still wearing well. Cheers.

There was a lot of attention on Doritos “Create your own ads” contest this year. One (“Cheesy”) uses a cool freeze frame art/animation technique and is fun until the woman ends up on her hands and knees. Instead, the “Checkout Girl” spot (Giddy up!) was a great way to showcase all the flavors and even slides in comments on each. It’s nice that they didn’t use a skinny model as the checkout girl. This is a very original and professional looking spot and gets better and better until the crammed-in “obligatory crunch bite.”

The Emerald Nuts spot is also a lot of fun and has a great premise: During the afternoon slumps, they say Robert Goulet comes in and “Messes with your stuff.” Goulet seems to relish his role as office prankster and the last shot of him on the ceiling is hilarious.

Bottom Feeders: the Top Five Losers

King Pharmaceuticals “Gotta have heart” was heartless! Awful. I was hoping the black limo would be the product to the rescue, but no, more horrible abuse and the poor heart guy is thrown into a wall and lies in rubble as the tagline comes up. Hardly inspires confidence in product or hope it will come to your aid.

In the Mars Snickers spot, we were told we could vote on multiple endings at afterthekiss.com. The one that wins after the exclamation “Quick do something manly” (ripping out chest hair) wasn’t very good but slightly better than the other endings offered online (drinking motor oil, a third mechanic asking to join the Love Boat and a smack with a wrench in the gut). There was only one product shot (incorporated early) and men kissing is not going to inspire a lot of guys to buy Snickers — especially with the product shot looking like a turd and the tagline of “Most Satisfying.”

Coke had a few good spots (the take-off on Grand Theft Auto was one and Black History month tribute another), but the animated marathon about what happens before the bottle drops in a vending machine was wildly over-produced. It seemed to be trying for enchanting, but just came off as creepy.

In GM’s Robot spot, a yellow robot is sad and moping after being fired and for a moment we’re thinking, “Okay, so GM is hiring people again instead of using robots to make cars!” But then we see the robot is just having a bad dream, followed by the line, “With a warranty like this, everyone is worried.” Everyone? This just reminds us that robots put people out of jobs. Now they’re trying to make them cute and make us feel sorry for them? Not a smart approach.

Chevy tried too hard to appeal to every possible target audience. The spot featuring various people singing to their cars was entirely transparent. The hip doesn’t hop and the country sounds like pop.

All in all, not an outstanding year for Super Bowl ads, but it’s great to see ad contests anyone can enter — and even better seeing the results. “Checkout Girl” was as good (if not better) than any Doritos ad I’ve ever seen — as was the NFL spot of dejected fans saying goodbye to the season. In all this push to recruit “home-made” ads, it’s apparent that there was plenty of creative talent on the sidelines this year.

via zagstudios.com

adweek.com

Eleftheria Parpis

NEW YORK I could honestly say that I was disappointed in this year’s crop of Super Bowl ads, that most weren’t all that special or even worth a late-night cable buy, let alone the $2.6 million that gets prime positioning during the game.

But I won’t. The truth is, just like every other year, there were highlights and lowlights. And at least this year I didn’t feel like throwing anything at my TV.

The first of Anheuser-Busch’s in-game spots displayed the brewery’s standard fare of buddy comedy: Two guys reach for the last Bud Light. A game of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” should resolve the issue, and it does, when one guy hits the other in the head with a rock.

I don’t know about you, but I’m bored with the Bud boy humor. Even a puppy riding a Clydesdale hitch and talking gorillas didn’t get me to crack a smile.

The best of the brewery’s spots was the hitchhiker ad: a couple picks up a man holding an axe and a six-pack (he assures them it’s a can opener). The three of them balk at picking up the next guy looking for a ride because he’s got a chainsaw. And that was the best of the bunch from A-B.

It was good to see Coca-Cola back on the game, especially with two spots that felt big and special thanks to arresting animation. One turned the violent world of Grand Theft Auto into a feel-good spot preaching, “give a little love.” The other provided an enthralling ride through “the happiness factory”—a Coke vending machine. Even though I’d seen this spot before, my eyes were still glued to the TV, spotting little critters I hadn’t noticed before. I wish I could say that about more of the commercials.

At least with the consumer-generated spots you can say, okay, they are just kids who have a lot to learn. But what were some of the professionals ad makers thinking? Take the office workers trying to survive the jungle for CareerBuilder.com. I like the new line, “Do more than just survive the workweek,” but these ads made me miss the chimps. Or the American Heart Association’s decision to show thugs literally pummeling a heart (to symbolize high blood pressure). And thankfully, I only see GoDaddy.com commercials once a year.

The amateur spots were surprisingly good. Doritos decided to run both contest finalists on the game. The crash spot didn’t do much for me, but the performance of the checkout girl got me laughing, even with the expected “clean up at register six” joke.

But in the end, I couldn’t help myself. The elaborate productions made me happiest of all.

The Garmin spot with the map monster vs. the laser-beam-shooting GSP hero was a great tribute to cheesy sci-fi movies. FedEx’s office on the moon wasn’t as funny as last year’s cavemen, but it was still fun to watch (was that a squirrel floating by?) And yes, the sad suicidal GM robot did make me feel more than Bud’s dirt-smeared pooch. But it also made me miss R2D2. He never let Darth get him down.

-David Gianatasio

BOSTON A pair of 30-second spots for Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light were the most viewed Super Bowl commercials, according to data provided by TiVo, which measured both live and recorded viewing in 10,000 subscriber households.Bud Light’s “Language Course,” starring comic Carlos Mencia, was the most viewed spot, followed by a commercial titled “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” TiVo said.

Ameritrade had held the lead slot among TiVo viewers in each of the last two years, but that company did not run any ads on yesterday’s Super Bowl.

This marks the fifth overall year that TiVo has measured Super Bowl viewing.

A FedEx spot called “Don’t Judge” placed third, the much-hyped Nationwide Insurance ad starring Kevin Federline as a fast-food worker came in fourth and a user-generated spot for Doritos, which dealt with crashing the Super Bowl, took fifth place.

During CBS’ telecast, “There was no buildup, no falloff. Viewing was steady for the whole game,” both during the on-field action and the commercial breaks, said Todd Juenger, vp, gm of audience research and measurement at TiVo. In past years, controversial plays had generated significant playback and caused “peaks and valleys” in home viewing.

Rounding out TiVo’s top 10 were spots from CareerBuilder.com, Blockbuster Video, Doritos, Chevrolet and Schick.

Thirty-second spots on yesterday’s Super Bowl cost in excess of $2.5 million. About 90 million viewers watched the game.

TiVo would not divulge the actual viewing figures. The service operates in 4.4 million households nationwide.

via adweek.com

-Steve McClellan

NEW YORK Anheuser-Busch topped a pair of national polls that measure the popularity of Super Bowl ads.

A-B placed seven spots among the top 10 in the annual USA Today survey. A-B also took five of the top 10 slots in an online Wall Street Journal poll.

The most popular ad, per USA Today, was a Budweiser entry that showed crabs worshiping a beer cooler. A Bud execution starring a stray puppy and the Clydesdales placed second, while Bud Light’s take on the game “Rock, Paper, Scissors” came in third.

The survey, published in the paper’s Monday edition, was based on the responses during the game of 238 adult viewers in Houston and McLean, Va.

In the WSJ poll, based on more than 4,600 responses tabulated by noon on Monday, a Bud Light ad featuring a class of immigrants learning English (taught by Comedy Central star Carlos Mencia) ranked first. It also placed fifth in the USA Today poll and was named the most viewed spot by TiVo.

The Bud stray-dog ad placed second and a Bud Light spot featuring hitchhikers came in third, according to the WSJ.

USA Today said the least popular ad was from Salesgenie.com, followed by executions from Revlon (starring Sheryl Crow) and Flomax.

Three ads tied for least popular in the WSJ survey: One from Fed-Ex (set on the moon), one from Hewlett-Packard and an execution from Toyota.
via adweek.com

By Bruce Horovitz, USA TODAY

Anheuser-Busch continued its Super Bowl ad supremacy with a commercial that pure and simple made folks smile.

For a record ninth-consecutive year, the beer giant won USA TODAY’S exclusive Ad Meter real-time consumer focus group ranking of Super Bowl commercials.

The winning ad featured a group of computer-generated crabs on the beach bowing down at the altar of an ice chest filled with Budweiser. The red chest with two Buds for antennae looks like a giant crab — which a crab army worships as the sun sets behind it. That’s the kind of gentle, visual humor folks apparently wanted most this year.

Folks such as Doyle Wind. The retired bread salesman from Houston says he particularly objects to ads with violence in light of the Iraq war. “My next door neighbor has three sons over there right now,” he says. “The way things are going now, we don’t need to be reminded of all that. There’s too much sadness now in the country. I guess that’s why I enjoy the funny (ads) more.”

The crab ad aired in the fourth quarter, becoming the first Ad Meter winner from that late in the game. A-B also walked off with four of the top five-rated commercials. And seven of the top 10.

The crustaceans’ visual humor has another advantage after Sunday for the international brewer. Explains Bob Lachky, A-B creative chief, at A-B: ‘We try to find something that will play around the world.”

This year, the usual array of humorous Super Bowl commercials had to fight off surprising competition from ads that made folks feel warm and fuzzy. But in the end, viewers wanted to laugh.

“Humor gets me over anything — not stupid humor,” says Kathleen Stobie, a Silver Spring, Md., resident who is a coordinator with her county government.

By contrast, slapstick violence sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. Panelists loved the Bud Light ad about a guy who takes a Rock, Paper, Scissors game too literally — and tosses a real rock to win a Bud Light. It finished third.

But they had little patience with another Bud Light ad featuring people who replace fist pumps with a series of face slaps.

With U.S. beer sales growth flat — particularly domestic brews — A-B once again went all out to win the Super Bowl of advertising. It broadcast nine commercials over five minutes of multimillion-dollar air time.

But the unusually high ranking of a Doritos commercial about a Doritos-eating guy who is distracted by a cute girl — the winner of an online contest for amateur videos — may shake up the future of Super Bowl advertising.

It’s the first time a major marketer entrusted a Super Bowl spot fetching up to $2.6 million for 30 seconds of air time to a novice.

The fourth-place spot was filmed for $12 — the price of the four bags of Doritos. Compare that with those it beat, several special effects-laden pro spots costing upwards of $1 million to make.

This also was the first year in which a majority of marketers clearly felt compelled to air commercials aimed at driving consumer to their websites. With ad rates at record levels and consumer eyes increasingly straying from the TV screen to the computer screen, marketers are looking to have their messages have traction beyond the big game. website names were attached to virtually every ad.

If ever there was a Super Bowl whose messages were directly aimed at the twentysomething and under crowd, this was it. That’s why a Coke ad had the feel of a video game. It’s why Chevrolet put young girls in a car in Manhattan that is swarmed by bare-chested guys. And it’s why Nationwide chose Kevin Federline, Britney Spear’s estranged hubby.

Call it the Anything For Attention Bowl. Many marketers took the low road for that attention. Snickers had two men kissing over a candy bar. A-B filled most of 30 seconds with face-slapping. And GoDaddy.com offered-up a sanitized version of a wet T-shirt contest.

It’s as if some marketers momentarily forgot how turned-off Super Bowl viewers were three years ago by the attention-getting gambit of Janet Jackson’s half-time wardrobe malfunction that bared one breast.

Apparently, just about anything that’s edgy — if not bizarre — is getting Madison Avenue’s green light, again.

But once again, automakers couldn’t buy a break. Despite six ads from three car companies, none made the viewers’ top 10.

Augustina Foglietta, an accountant from Houston, summed up the feeling of many about car commercials. “Hate ‘em,” she says. “I think they’re boring, and there’s just too many of ‘em.”

via usatoday.com

via testpattern.msnbc.msn.com

by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

Are you ready for some football? Or, more importantly, are you ready for some Super Bowl ads? As I mentioned last week, I’ll be blogging about the big game’s commercials right here, and invite you to join in via the comment field. Note that we’re talking ads only here, leaving the rah-rah rooting and reviews of the on-field action to others. And I may not get to every single ad, so if I skip one and you want to chat about it, bring it up in the comments.

If you’re more interested in the gridiron action than the ads, check out my colleague, Sunny Wu’s, blog of the on-field action. He may dip into our territory too, mentioning certain commercials as the ads appeal to him.

And our business section has set up a NCAA-tourney style bracket of the ads, which promises to be a lot of fun, too. Check that out here.

FIRST HALF:

JESSICA SIMPSON FOR PIZZA HUT
Wait, was that a Super Bowl ad? They almost slipped that right past me, it was so ordinary. Was there anything in that commercial that you couldn’t see in any random ad the rest of the year? Cheesy Bites indeed, emphasis on the “cheesy.” And I hear a rumor this is just part of a series. Oh, yay.

BUD: ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS
So they play Rock, Paper, Scissors with real rocks and paper. Rock wins. As a friend of mine says, “It IS a rock, after all. Should beat anything.” But I’m not actually even sure what beer was being advertised, which you’d think is the point.

DORITOS READER-SUBMITTED AD
We’ve certainly heard a lot about these. Can regular folks make ads any better than Madison Avenue? Based on this one, where people smash into a bunch of things because they’re Doritos-happy, my guess is “no.” Reminds me of the VW ads where you start closing your eyes early because the accidents are kind of upsetting.

BLOCKBUSTER PET STORE
Animated animals are usually pretty cute. But the “clicking and dragging” of the real mouse? Yeah, just came across as mean to me. PETA no doubt has Blockbuster on speed dial. From your comments, though, I’m the only one who thought it wasn’t hilarious.

SIERRA MIST BEARD COMBOVER
Yuck, although perhaps not that far from what Donald Trump may be trying for his next hairdo. At first I thought this was the Geico caveman trying a new gig. It also reminds me of today’s “Ask the Ethicist” in the NY Times, in which a teacher isn’t hired simply because he has a beard. The Ethicist, as usual, is no help.

SALESGENIE.COM
Just…what? Is it 1970 all of a sudden? Slick salesman with the red sportscar impressing the ladies? Oh, I don’t know. And I have no idea what the site even does.

SIERRA MIST MARTIAL ARTS
OK, kind of funny. Am I the only one out there who thinks “Sierra Mist” is one clunky name for a soft drink? I mean, I guess a two-word name works fine for “Mountain Dew,” but “Sierra Mist” comes off to me like a Safeway house brand, or something. I guess we’ll be seeing a lot of that product tonight, though.

TOYOTA TUNDRA
Truck races through a steel door, stops at the edge of a cliff. What is it with these ads creeping me out? Not that we haven’t seen this in every sci-fi movie, but you have to wonder if they ever didn’t make it through the door in rehearsal. Reminds me of “SNL”: “Bring in the stunt baby!”

MOON OFFICE
Heh, I like the floating dog. What is this ad for? Oh, “Firefly.” Er, I mean, FedEx. My favorite ad so far.

BUD LIGHT AUCTIONEER WEDDING
Who couldn’t use that guy at a wedding every once in a while? Let’s cruise through the ceremony and get to the buffet, already. Not bad.

SNICKERS MEN MAKE OUT
Stupidest. Ad. Ever. My friend Andy checked out the Web site listed, and notes that there are four endings to this commercials and viewers are supposed to vote on the one they like best. How about I vote that this commercial be sealed in Kryptonite and buried at the bottom of the sea, never to be seen again by anyone? How about that?

CHEVYS MAKE EVERYONE SING
It took me a second to get this, but I guess the pitch was based on “there are a lot of popular songs that mention Chevy.” Got it? I do like hearing the music, though.

BUD LIGHT LANGUAGE CLASS
Were all beer ads written by people who were already drunk on the product? I tell ya.

LETTERMAN-OPRAH
Really a promo, not a commercial, but I’ll post about it here since people are bound to love it. And Oprah living in Chicago and Dave being from Indy, it even works in that regard. Somehow I think Dave and Oprah would be pretty fun to watch the game with. You just know they’d have something smart to say about that stupid Snickers ad. Oprah would deliver a smart lecture on how it’s really OK for men to kiss and Dave would rip off Paul Schaffer’s chest hair, or something.

Did I lose the coin flip, or something? Who knew that covering the commercials would be boring, and the game itself would actually be full of tricks and treats? Hey Sunny, want to trade jobs?

GO DADDY MARKETING BABES
Yeah, no women watch the Super Bowl, or use your Web site, whatever it is. Don’t worry, we’re not in the least bit offended when we’re shown as being sprayed down with hoses for the enjoyment of men. Keep right on appealing to the brain-free. What did Bill Cosby have his characters say? “Russell, you’re like school in summer. No class.”

COKE AND COMPUTER-GENERATED PEOPLE
I thought this was an ad for “The Sims” until the last second there. Although I guess it more closely resembled “Grand Theft Auto.” Is this a game Coke, with their relentlessly family-friendly, perky image, really wants to be down with?

BUD: HUNGRY DOGGY IN THE SPOTLIGHT
My new favorite ad. Hungry, lost mongrel gets splashed with mud, can now pass for a firetruck Dalmatian and is accepted up onto beauty queen’s lap. Awwww. Good use of “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head,” too.

GARMIN JAPANESE MONSTER MOVIE
Wow, that was either really stupid or loopily wonderful. I need a second to decide.

MEN RUN FROM TRAINING SEMINAR: CAREER BUILDER
I am sensing a theme here: Let’s only appeal to men. Only men watch football. Only men buy products. Only men need Web sites. Or maybe: Only men make the ads?

DORITOS VIEWER-MADE AD: CASHIER GETS FLIRTY
This is what Doritos picked out of X zillion viewer-made submissions? Maybe we should leave the commercial-making to the pros. Except that pros apparently made the Snickers commercial, so perhaps there is a flaw in my theory.

MEN STRIP FOR CHEVY
How do parents watch this game with their kids? I mean, seriously: They have to explain to them that this is supposed to be funny?

BUD: SLAPPING REPLACES FIST-BUMPING
Sometimes you start to wonder: Is it me? Does everyone else think this is funny except for me? How did this ad get past a zillion focus groups and ad execs? Am I a humorless prude out of touch with modern America? Or does the emperor have no clothes? And right now I’m thinking: Hey, that emperor, he is NEKKID.

PEOPLE DRESSED UP LIKE DISEASES/CONDITIONS ATTACK A HEART
What?

GM: ASSEMBLY LINE ROBOT DREAMS OF SUICIDE
This is much funnier, only not in a way GM ever intended, if you read “Rivethead.” Or saw “Roger and Me,” where one scene focuses on the short-lived theme park AutoWorld, where a robotic autoworker sings a love song to the robot replacing him on the line. Also, some folks are questioning the suicide element of the ad, both for sheer taste issues and because the robot was so darn cute kids worried he might actually jump.

COKE: BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Not that we’re not big fans of Rosa Parks, but Coke pretty much phoned that in. Show the product, show some incredible phrases about history, hope viewers associate the two. Phoned it in.

The latest from the sports desk: Game blogger Sunny Wu is refusing to swap jobs with me. Seems he prefers this lively, close game to these not-so-lively ads. Also, reader revolt is forming in the comments because I am a “Negative Nancy” who does not like enough of the ads.

SPRINT: CONNECTILE DYSFUNCTION
Nope, that one’s not going to help me shed the “Negative Nancy” label, either.

HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER PROMO
It’s not a real commercial, but I have to comment on the “How I Met Your Mother” promo in which the characters go to great lengths to try and get through the day after the Super Bowl without learning who won. Heh. I kind of appreciate that because it feels almost impossible to do in this day and age — as we at MSNBC.com discover when we receive angry emails after almost every major sporting event or TV show from people who are furious that we spoiled the result for them.

DORITOS: BLACK HISTORY, TAKE TWO
That one worked better for me than the Coke ad: Doritos (I mistyped as ”Coke” at first) shows little snippets of people, mostly African-Americans, watching the game. Obviously going for the Black History Month angle, but in a more subtle way.

COKE: MR. HADLEY GETS DARING
Not a bad ad, here, but overall, I’m missing something…missing the great Super Bowl ads of the past, like herding cats and Mean Joe Greene…the ads you really talk about the next day. Mr. Hadley isn’t awful, but neither is he especially memorable. Unlike, say, this game.

GEICO: THE CAVEMAN IS BACK
Readers loved these furry-faced guys in our summer commercial contest, and it’s fun to see them back. I also like ads that rely on images and music rather than BRAYING AND SCREAMING THE PRODUCT NAME, so I liked it. Welcome back, Cave Guy!

HALFTIME QUICK RECAP:
BEST AD: Budweiser stray dog gets mud splashed on him, becomes a star
WORST AD: Snickers is grossed out by men kissing, but not by chest-hair ripping.

Short version: Budweiser’s stray dog turned Dalmatian is very cute. He’s about the only ad that’s received resoundingly positive comments, and we haven’t even seen a Clydesdale-starring ad yet.

Just a note: If anyone sees a regional ad that they think is worth commenting on, feel free to describe it in the comments, since we all see different ones at certain times. Here in Seattle we just saw a Washington Mutual ad that I am guessing is regional. It involved a bunch of old naked bankers who were thrilled because they can bank online without getting dressed. Yeah, that’s about it. I had to TiVo it and watch it again to see if I was missing the point, but…no. Uh, those were some pale and scrawny naked legs, there.

My colleague Sunny Wu continues to refuse to swap blogs with me. Thanks a lot, pal. Obviously, he knows a good thing when he sees it, and he has the far more interesting subject matter this year.

ETRADE: BANK ROBBERY
Yes, we do feel our banks rob us.

COKE: RUBE GOLDBERG-ESQUE MACHINE
Cute. This feels more like a real Super Bowl ad to me. It looks like it took some time to prepare, and it reminds me of the old “Mousetrap” game. Someone has commented that the Coke ads have all been shown in movie theaters. Remember when there were no commercials in movie theaters? Seems like 100 years ago.

BUD LIGHT: MONKEYING AROUND
I’m a sucker for the animals. I liked this one. Wait, what’d ya say?

SHERYL CROW COLORS HER HAIR
Sheryl Crow colors her hair: Film at 11! Tom in Manhattan wants to know if I’m happy now, what with my earlier ranting about how the ads are all aimed at beer-swilling “Animal House” types. Happy? Not until she pours a pitcher of water on her shirt! Oh, OK, just kidding. I give you this: That ad was definitely not aimed at “Animal House” types.

OFFICE TYPES GO ‘GLADIATOR’ FOR CAREER BUILDER
Heh, I liked this one more than their other ad. Thumbs-up for the Post-It-Note suit and the three-ring binder-heads.

TACO BELL LIONS
It’s no Budweiser muddy puppy, but it’s fun anyway. They’ve saved the better ads for the second half, I guess — or at least the funny animal ads.

VAN HEUSEN SHIRTS
No one can say this one didn’t appeal to the women, what with the shirtless stud doffing his VanHeusen shirt.

TUNDRA: TRUCK STOPS ON A RAMP
If I want a truck that I can drive in “Fear Factor,” this is it.

EMERALD NUTS: ROBERT GOULET MESSES WITH YOUR STUFF
Robert Goulet channels Michael Scott from “The Office.” I am pretty sure I have never heard of this snack brand.

SIR CHARLES AND DWYANE WADE: T-MOBILE
“Is this your dad?” Is this an old ad, or just similar to one I’ve seen before? It reminds me of seeing an interview with Sacha Baron Cohen in character as Borat, where he says he was thrilled to see “Ashton Kutcher and his mom Demi Moore” at his movie premiere, or some such.

DON’T JUDGE BY OUR NAME: FED EX GROUND
This reminded me of those jokes we loved in grade school: What do you call a guy in the ocean with no arms and legs? Bob! Ha ha…ha?

K-FED FOR NATIONWIDE
The most talked-about ad before the game: K-Fed working the fryer. If only it were true, but instead K-Fed is turning down $25 million as not enough to support his lifestyle.

HITCHHIKER WITH AN AXE: BUD LIGHT
At first I thought that was the Geico caveman, but it was just a crazy simulation. But I liked this one for its broad humor and the shock in the voice of Axe Man as he spots Leatherface’s chainsaw-toting kin. Also, I just watched the original “Hitcher,” so I am not offering a ride to anyone.

ACURA: HELPING PEOPLE ADVANCE
We were supposed to have hovercraft! They promised us hovercraft!

JACK IN THE BOX: JACK’S KID WANTS TO BE A VEGETARIAN
Is this national or regional? We didn’t have Jack in the Box fast fooderies in Minnesota where I used to live, but even if this isn’t national, it’s pretty funny. The son of the Jack in the Box clown gives a school speech saying he wants to be a vegetarian, but it turns out he means “veterinarian.” Reminds me of the 1980s song “Cause I’m a Blonde,” where Julie Brown sing-says “I just want to say that being chosen as this month’s Miss August is like, a compliment I’ll remember for as long as I can. Right now I’m a freshman in my fourth year at UCLA, but my goal is to become a veterinarian, ’cause I love children.”

CRABS BOW DOWN TO BUDWEISER
Animal ads. Hard to lose with animal ads, I’m tellin’ ya. My pal Sunny makes the joke that had to be made: “The beach … crabs … Budweiser — sounds like a bad spring break I had during college.”

PRUDENTIAL: ROCKS HAVE MANY PURPOSES
Reminds me of a project in a class I took where we had to create an ad campaign for a regular ol’ rock. I marketed mine as a pesticide-free insect repellent. However, readers have a more-modern interpretation, as several comments refer to the fact that “a rock” sounded to them like “Iraq.”

ELVIS HAS BURNING LOVE FOR THE CR-V
The car ads are just all running together for me, but I like the song.

AMERICAN CHOPPER GUYS FOR HP
This just reminds me I used to really like “American Chopper.” And now I don’t even know if it’s still on.

IZOD SNOW GLOBE/BEACH
Izod is still around? Do they still have the little alligators and the popped collars? They pretty much owned every high school hallway in the 1980s, even for those of us who were as far from preppy as you could be.

JAY-Z AND DON SHULA: FUTURISTIC FOOTBALL-CHESS FOR BUD
Bud is just flooding the zone with ads. I’m not sure where they were going with this one, except to make people say “Huh, Jay-Z and Don Shula, wouldn’t have pegged them for chess players.”

FLOMAX
That was great of “Saturday Night Live” to let them slip in a parody ad there, considering “SNL” runs on a different network and all. Wait, what? It’s not?

ONE FINGER IS VERY POWERFUL: ETRADE
They forgot one powerful use of a single finger: If you are a Mooninite, you can shut down Boston. I liked this ad, though: Save Holland! And as someone in the comments noted, it sure did look like the Geico caveman was the accused murderer.

CAREER BUILDER GUYS STILL RE-ENACTING ‘SURVIVOR’
Those binder clips on the guy’s chest looked pretty darn painful. I wouldn’t have expected this ad campaign to be a series, but I think the ads are improving as the game goes on. Or maybe I’m just getting woozy.

HONDA CARS SWERVE AROUND TRAFFIC CONES
See what I mean? The car ads are just all running together. That could have been any car model out there, and unless I’m going to be driving around traffic cones in the desert, the visuals don’t make me want to buy a car.

GO DADDY MARKETING RERUN
Hey, why not start rerunning them? We might have missed the subtle nuances the first time around.

GREEN TEA SNAPPLE: WHAT IS EGCG?
Still don’t know what EGCG is, still don’t really care.

NFL: RECOVERING FROM FOOTBALL
Oh yeah, you’re laughing, but this is a pretty apt depiction of how many football fans are about to feel in about a half-hour. Liked the jazz funeral music. Hey, Brett Favre. There’s a guy who needs a new agent — he can just never seem to get any publicity. You never hear or read about what he might be doing.

AND…GAME!
What, no Clydesdales?

>via testpattern.msnbc.msn.com

cbsnews.com

Katie Crabb’s Commercial For Chevy Debuted During Sunday’s Game

By John Kreiser

(CBS/AP)  Katie Crabb says she constantly struggles to speak up and get her ideas across.

But executives at Chevrolet liked what they heard — and for the past four months, this self-described shy 19-year-old has kept a $2.6 million secret: She’s a big-time advertising guru.

Crabb won a nationwide competition for college students sponsored by Chevrolet to design a 30-second commercial for the company’s new line of crossover cars.

Chevrolet aired the ad during the Super Bowl, an event watched as much for the commercials as for the game itself. The average price for a 30-second spot during the game, which was broadcast Sunday on CBS, is $2.6 million.

“I can’t even imagine having that much money in my life and then to spend it on one 30-second spot,” Crabb said at her home in North Prairie, about 45 miles west of Milwaukee.

Crabb was revealed as the winner of the contest on Friday during CBS’ airing of “Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials.” Until then, she couldn’t tell anyone, except for a few professors at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where she has since transferred to study English education and theater, her adviser at her old university and her family.

She also appeared on The Early ShowMonday, from Miami, where she spent the weekend at the Super Bowl. 

Chevrolet put out the call to college students this fall, asking them to design a spot targeting a younger audience, highlighting either the HHR, Cobalt, Equinox or Aveo.

Plenty of other brands, such as Doritos and even the National Football League, have gotten into the amateur ad craze as well — especially during the Super Bowl, when the stakes are high and slots are expensive.

Students were told the winning ad would have to be “smart, simple and breakthrough,” said Kim Kosak, general director of advertising and sales promotions for Chevrolet, a unit of General Motors Corp.

“We wanted something that was risk-taking and breakthrough, because if you’re going to do the Super Bowl you have to take risks,” Kosak said.

Crabb, then a freshman at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, entered the competition as an assignment in a journalism class. She never thought she would win, she said.

“It was one of those things where you take the opportunity because it’s there. But it’s like, ‘It’s going to happen to someone else because it never happens to you.’ That kind of mindset,” she said.

Chevrolet received entries from 820 teams from 230 schools. Five teams — 11 students in all — were selected as finalists and brought to Detroit in late October to work with advertising professionals to hone their pitches and present their ideas.

Crabb was the youngest participant and the only solo finalist.

Her ad, which will air throughout the year, shows an HHR stopped in New York City and men swarming the car, hoping to wash it so they can touch it. Crabb said her ad shows a different side of Chevrolet and takes a different approach to advertising for cars, which often are aimed at a male audience and feature women. As a football fan, she said she’s watched the games, and commercials, for years.

“We never get commercials that are for us — very rarely we do, especially with car commercials,” Crabb said of women.

And then she had to make it funny.

“You’re never going to get noticed without being funny or so out there that people are like, ‘What was that?”‘ she said.

Kosak said judges chose Crabb’s ad because it was easy to understand and appealed to all ages.

“It’s very simple, it’s very smart because it all emanates from the product. But it has a very different feel for Chevrolet,” she said.

Crabb took part in filming the ad in New York and gave input so it didn’t stray much from her original vision. She said she’s interested in film and hopes to pursue that one day.

Eventually, Crabb hopes life gets back to normal so she can settle into her studies at her new school. This summer, as part of her prize, she’ll intern at advertising firm Campbell-Ewald, a unit of Interpublic Group of Cos., Inc. which handles all of Chevrolet’s advertising. She had planned to continue working as a waitress at her hometown Applebee’s, but figures the advertising gig will be a good learning experience, too.

Crabb was also offered a full-time job at the firm. Of course, she doesn’t graduate for several more years, so who knows what will happen, she said with a smile.

“Right now, if I learn anything from this, it’s ‘go where the wind takes you,’” she said.

abcnews.go.com

Are Today’s High-Tech Ads as Memorable As Those of the Past?

At this year’s Super Bowl, advertisers will pay as much as $2.6 million for a 30-second spot.

It’s a huge jump from the price tag of a Super Bowl ad decades ago, and the tactics have changed, too. Instead of relying on stick-in-your-head jingles and unforgettable characters, many advertisers now employ flashy graphics and out-of-this-world effects.

But as the stakes in the ad wars continue to grow, “Good Morning America” wondered, would the memorable, not so well-”hyped” commercials of years past work as well as today’s high-budget, high-tech ads?

According to Jerry Della Femina, CEO of Della Femina Rothschild Jeary and Partners and an advertising industry veteran, today’s consumers wouldn’t fall for the ads of yore.

“Some commercials that worked no longer work because people are smarter. They don’t fall for it,” he said. “Commercials have to be smart and better because you have a much smarter consumer out there.”

Femina believes that many consumers won’t just settle for catchy jingles and simple messages when big-budget special effects and celebrity-driven images bombard them at every turn.

Companies know that, and they’re pulling out all the stops for the Super Bowl.

Coca-Cola goes digital for the game, putting a gentler spin on a popular video game. Pizza Hut is once again using Jessica Simpson to hawk its pies. Nationwide Mutual picked a D-list celebrity, Britney Spears’ ex-husband Kevin Federline, who pokes fun at himself in an ad.

 
Do Big Names Equal Big Business?

Whether the crowd-pleasing ads will be remembered by consumers after the game ends remains to be seen.

“It’s not how much you spend on a commercial, it’s really the idea behind the commercial and if it works,” Della Femina said. “You’ve got to stop people almost immediately on television now, and it’s got to work.”

So even though Sunday’s high-octane Super Bowl ads may be more entertaining than those from 20 or 30 years ago, they may not be able to score as many points with consumers in the long run.

In the advertising world, high-tech features and hefty price tags don’t guarantee immortality.

In the case of the iconic Oscar Meyer ad, a cute kid and a catchy jingle were all the company needed to have Americans singing about bologna long after the commercial and the campaign were over.

cbsnews.com

Winning Contest Doesn’t Mean Amateurs Can (Or Should) Make Ads

by Andrew Keen

It’s amateur hour at the Super Bowl this year. On Sunday, 90 million television viewers on CBS will be subjected to commercials made by “You” — Time magazine’s Person of The Year for 2006. Three Super Bowl XLI advertisers — Doritos, the National Football League, and Chevrolet — will all be running 30-second commercial spots made by amateurs. The Web 2.0 revolution in user-generated content has infiltrated the American living room. These amateur creators, who Time praise as “people formerly known as consumers,” are now providing the entertainment at the biggest event in the media calendar.This is not good news. The shift from professionally produced to user-generated advertising makes us poorer in both economic and cultural terms. The arrival of user-created commercials at Super Bowl XLI represents the American Idolization of traditional entertainment — the degeneration of professional content into a “talent show” for amateurs.

We, the conventional television audience, are certainly losers in this new fashion for user-generated advertisements. We have traditionally watched Super Bowl commercials to be entertained by memorable ads. Often, these commercials are more memorable than the game. Occasionally, they even represent significant cultural moments in American history. Few of us, for example, can remember who won Super Bowl in 1984 (Los Angeles Raiders 38, Washington Redskins 9), where it was played (Tampa), or who sang the national anthem (Barry Manilow). But most of us can remember the Chiat/Day produced, Ridley Scott directed, commercial for the Macintosh computer, with its Orwellian subtext and its indelible explanation of why “1984 wasn’t going to be like 1984.”

Don’t expect a repeat of Chiat/Day and Ridley Scott’s creative genius during Super Bowl XLI. Doritos are already previewing the five finalists in their competition on the Yahoo! website. One commercial features a chip-chomping rock climber falling off a mountain; another has a giant mouse bursting out of a wall, scavenging for cheese-flavored chips; a third has a young woman falling over because she’s looking at her chips and not the road. All five of the finalists contain the same predictable, dorm-room aesthetic, low production qualities, and poor acting. The brain trust at Doritos deserves thanks for not exposing us to the other 1,100 entrants.

Why is the work of the amateur of a lesser quality than professionally made content? There’s the intrinsic talent of a lifelong professional, such as Ridley Scott, of course. Then there’s the financial resources made available to the professional content creator. Back in 1984, Apple paid Chiat/Day $1.6 million to produce their Mac ad. Today, according to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the average professionally-produced 30-second spot costs $381,000. In contrast, wedding photographer Jarod Cicon, one of the five finalists in the Doritos competition, estimates that his 30-second ad cost $150 to produce.

Web 2.0 advocates, who are apologists for user-generated content (such as Chris Anderson, the author of the best-selling book “The Long Tail”), promise that the amateurs of the new digital democracy can create the same quality content for a tiny proportion of the traditional cost. But this simply isn’t true. Watch the Doritos commercials side-by-side with some classic Super Bowl commercials, such as the Budweiser “Frogs” (1995) or “Cedric” (2001) spots. It’s like tasting a homemade elderberry wine after a glass of the best Cabernet.

The economics of amateur hour at the Super Bowl are disturbing. If today’s typical commercial costs $381,000 and an amateur advertisement costs $150 to produce, then what happens to the money which isn’t spent on the creative? Given that Doritos are awarding $10,000 to the five finalists in their talent show, that still leaves some $331,000 on the table. To use a fashionable Web 2.0 term, the professional creator is being “disintermediated.” CBS doesn’t lose anything because they still charge Doritos over $2.5 million for the 30 second spot. Instead, it’s the professional creator — the scriptwriter, cameraman, audio expert — who is being squeezed out of the economy by this infestation of amateur content.

Markets are markets and there’s no reason to cry for simply for the loss of jobs in one sector, so long as new efficiencies are being created. But in this instance, the loss of jobs is accompanied by worse, not better products. This is true across the media industry and not just in the advertising business.

As Columbia University Economics professor Jagwish Bhagwati has argued, digital technology is undermining the wages of the American middle class. Web 2.0 technologies which enable amateurs to make dumbed-down replicas of professional work are particularly responsible for what Bhagwati calls the “tsumani” of downward pressure on wages created by new technology.

Amateur content on user-generated video sites such as Google’s YouTube is undermining the value of professionally-made video content. American Idol now has an online competition called “American Idol Underground,” which is making the traditional music A&R person redundant. HarperCollins is undermining the traditional role of literary agents by running online competitions to “discover” amateur writers. The result of all this democratization of media is fewer creative jobs and more amateurish books, movies, and music. And commercials, too.

Super Bowl ads through the ages

A spot cost $1.2 million 10 years ago. Now, it’s $2.6 million. Don’t expect prices to fall anytime soon.

By Paul R. La Monica, CNNMoney.com editor at large

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Indianapolis? Chicago? Who cares? For many, the battle between Anheuser-Busch, FedEx and CareerBuilder for funniest commercial is what matters on Super Bowl Sunday.

The hype around Super Bowl spots has reached a fever pitch this year.

CBS (Charts), which will be broadcasting Super Bowl XLI from Miami on Sunday, is said to be charging as much as a record $2.6 million for a 30-second commercial, up slightly from the $2.5 million Walt Disney (Charts)-owned ABC got for an ad last year.

But it wasn’t that long ago that a 30-second Super Bowl ad cost “just” $1.2 million. That was the going rate for a spot in 1997, according to figures from research firm TNS Media Intelligence. And 10 years earlier, Super Bowl ads cost just $600,000. So the price of a commercial has more than quadrupled in the past twenty years.

And guess what? It’s likely to get even crazier next year with Super Bowl XLII. That’s just the way it is.

“I can’t imagine the ad rates will ever go down,” said Walter Guarino, an advertising professor at Seton Hall University. “The ads are a fall-back, a fail-safe to keep up the entertainment value going if the game is a bomb. They’ve now taken front and center stage.”

What’s more, the networks are milking more and more ad money from the Super Bowl by showing even more commercials. According to TNS, there was over 47 minutes of commercials (including house ads for ABC programs) on last year’s telecast, up from 37 minutes just five years ago.

But you probably won’t hear Super Bowl-watchers complain. The game is arguably now more about the ads than the action on the gridiron.

Michael Pavone, president of Pavone, a brand consulting firm in Harrisburg, Pa. that runs Spotbowl, a Web site where viewers can vote for their favorite commercials, said Apple’s (Charts) famous “1984″ ad for the Macintosh changed everything.

It raised the bar for how lavish a Super Bowl ad could be and since then hype about the ads has been so intense that the discussion of the commercials leading up to the game often overshadows the game itself.

“People anticipate the Super Bowl commercials like they do movie premiers,” said Steve McKee, president of McKee Wallwork Cleveland Advertising, an agency that runs Adbowl, another site that tracks opinions about Super Bowl commercials.

To that end, Pavone cited a 2005 survey by consulting firm Penn, Schoen and Berland that showed just how much interest there is in the game compared to the commercials. According to the survey, 58 percent of respondents said they’d rather miss some of the game than any of the ads.

What’s more, 58 percent also said they talk about the commercials at work on Monday compared to just 47 percent who talk about the game.

And people don’t just have interest in this year’s commercials. There is a sense of nostalgia for “classic” Super Bowl ads. Go to YouTube, the popular video site owned by Google (Charts), and you’ll find that several users have posted the Apple 1984 commercial and that those posts have been viewed by more than 200,000 people in the past year.

CBS is even running a prime-time special on Friday called “Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials” which will showcase ads such as the Apple spot, the Michael Jordan versus Larry Bird “Nothing but net” commercial for McDonald’s (Charts) in 1993 and EDS’ “Cat herder” spot from 2000.

Viewers will have a chance to vote for their favorite to see if it could dethrone Coca-Cola’s (Charts) 1980 Mean Joe Greene ad as the most popular Super Bowl commercial ever.

The network aired a similar show last year (even though it wasn’t broadcasting the game) that was watched by more than 9 million viewers. The program’s executive producer said that even though there isn’t much new in this year’s show, there is still heavy interest in it.

“The success of our show is pretty amazing in that you are not dealing with a lot of new material. By and large, it’s the same commercials. But you want to see them again. It’s like reliving those great TV moments and people don’t mind seeing them year-in and year-out,” said Bob Horowitz, executive producer for “Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials.”

Still, the question begs to be asked. Do Super Bowl commercials really work?

It’s one thing to be able to vividly remember last year’s popular spot from Anheuser-Busch (Charts) featuring a lamb streaking during one of the Clydesdale horses’ football games or even the famous 1973 Joe Namath-Farrah Fawcett Noxzema shaving cream ad. But do the commercials actually make you more likely to drink Bud and shave with Noxzema?

One marketing executive says too many Super Bowl advertisers these days think more about making people laugh instead of making people want to buy your product.

“An ad can be entertaining with sophomoric humor as long as it gives you an idea of what the commercial is selling,” said Spyro Kourtis, president of the Hacker Group, an ad agency in Bellevue, Wash. “A million viewers are not as valuable in my mind as 100,000 customers and that’s the perspective that more advertisers should have.”

But even if there is a debate about how effective a Super Bowl ad really is, there is no question that without the commercials, Sunday’s game would lose a lot of its allure to the many people who are only familiar with Peyton Manning because they’ve seen him in a commercial.

“There are no shows on network TV that if you took the commercials out, the ratings would go down,” said Horowitz. “It’s the opposite with the Super Bowl. Here, if you took the commercials away, you’d probably lose 25 percent of the audience.”

via money.cnn.com