Which Commerical Was Best?

Here’s something I never thought I’d say: “It was a bad year for commercials.” It was. There were few to like in the Super Bowl (though the game itself was unusually entertaining).

I have two favorites – and one isn’t really a commercial. It was a very short CBS promo featuring David Letterman and Oprah Winfrey. If you blinked, it was gone.

It was totally nuance. You had to concentrate. Did you recognize Oprah? Did you think about their back story? Did you realize he was from Indianapolis, she lives in Chicago?

Unless you connected all these on a visceral level, it was gone before you could think about it.

My other favorite was more in your face… and animated. It was the Blockbuster commercial featuring a mouse portraying a mouse. It was clever and really well animated.

Unfortunately, when I went to type this blog entry, I wasn’t able to remember who paid for it!

Among my other favorites were the Budweiser faux dalmatian (including animated blink) and the T-Mobile spot with Dwayne Wade and Charles Barkley.

So, to summarize. It was a good year for the game and a bad year for what came in between the plays.

Here’s how aol.com visitors rated the first quarter (where the Blockbuster ad first ran).


Blockbuster: Mouse.............46%

Bud Light: Faceoff...............15%

Snickers: Mechanic.............11%

Doritos: Crash.....................9%

Bud Light: Wedding..............7%

Chevrolet: Singers...............5%

Sierra Mist: Combover.........3%

FedEx: Moon Office..............2%

Toyota: Tundra...................1%

Sierra Mist: Karate..............1%

Schick: Quattro...................0%

Salesgenie.com...................0%

Total Votes: 67,823

How would you like being the creative head for an ad agency that produced anything lower than Chevy? Must have been tough to come in to work this morning. Ouch!

One thought on “Which Commerical Was Best?”

  1. I thought that the most striking aspect of many of the Super Bowl ads was violence and meanness. The NY Times has an article on this, suggesting that the violence of the ads is tied to the Iraq war. I don’t buy any direct connection to Iraq, but I agree with the Times that many of the ads exploited “violence in an exaggerated, cartoonlike vein that was intended to be humorous, but often came across as cruel or callous.” The game, on the other hand, seemed tame and listless, particularly as played by the Chicago Bears. Perhaps Madison Avenue should have produced the Bears’ defense rather than the beer commercials.

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