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Super Bowl XL ads
The fact that this year’s crop of Super Bowl ads started better than they finished might have been more a product of my own growing disillusion with the game than anything that was wrong with the commercials themselves. Although, if I were an advertiser who was familiar with how Super Bowl games usually go, I’d stack up my best ads at the beginning, too.

Burger King’s new turn on the old “Have It Your Way” song (with the Whopperettes) was a delight of color and nostalgia. The Sierra Mist ad with the security agent pretending to hear her wand beep so she could confiscate the guy’s soft drink was funny. There were a couple of amusing Diet Pepsi ads with Jay Mohr as the soda’s agent, negotiating a music video with Diddy and a movie with Jackie Chan (in which Diet Pepsi demanded a stunt double). All of these were shown in the early stages of the first quarter.

But my favorites were easily the series of commercials for Bud Light, especially the first one, with the flunky riding up in the elevator with the Boss, bragging that he’d hidden beers around the office to boost morale. Then the elevator doors open and there are workers partying and burying their fists in the walls and coming out with beer bottles. The other Bud Light ads, the one with the secret revolving fridge and the other with the bear, were nearly as good.

There were a few other memorable ads during the course of the game. Budweiser’s animal-oriented commercials are always entertaining, and I especially enjoyed the tender scene of the big horses helping the little guy pull the wagon without letting him know they were pushing. And Kermit singing “Being Green” to celebrate the environmentally friendly Ford Escape Hybrid was fun.

But what is GoDaddy.com and what was that mess of a commercial all about? And the spots for the new Cadillac Escalade were pointless and incomprehensible (at least to me). You cold put all of the movie trailers together, and it wouldn’t make me want to see a single one of those pictures. None.

Of all the later ads, my favorites were the ones for CareerBuilder.com, the guy working with monkeys and the woman working with jackasses (literally). And I sort of liked the Pirate mascot who was shilling for Sharpie retractable pens (because he couldn’t sign autographs with his hook). Oh, and the Hummer spot featuring the movie monster and the giant robot falling in love. That was good, too.

Come to think of it, maybe this wasn’t such an off year for commercials after all.

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