Badvertising: Super Bowl Preview

It would be criminal (not to mention incredibly lazy) for me to miss out on the best Badvertising opportunity of the year. Naturally, we're talking about the Super Bowl here. As I've said before, the idea of just "watching for the commercials" is dumb, because the commercials are often available to view at your leisure on Youtube or the websites of the various companies. In many cases they'll even post the ads prior to the game, which is great for me since it gives me a bunch of material.

Looking over most of these "sneak previews" I have to think (and hope) that these are the weaker commercials in the bunch. None are particularly great, and it makes sense that the companies would put them out there early in order to build some buzz. If they debuted during the game they'd likely be overshadowed by the better or more memorable ads in all the post-game commercial buzz. My guess is that they realized that their 3 million bucks would go down the tubes unless they put their ads out there.

Enough with this pseudo-marketing analysis, lets get to the commercials.

Doritos- Too Delicious



Kinda funny, but I'm not sure why you'd advertise that your product is so good is makes people vaporize.

Doritos - Power of the Crunch



That looks like it hurt. Probably as much as eating a bag of Doritos.

Miller High life- One Second Ads



Like it, though apparently these might not be the actual one second ads. Still not gonna touch a Miller, but I do enjoy the campaign.

Careerbuilder.com- Rule



Nice concept, but sooooo long and soooo annoying after a while.

Pedigree Dog Adoption Drive



Ha! Love that Frisbee toss!


Godaddy.com- another "controversial" ad that's actually lame and boring



GoDaddy has done this for 4 or 5 years. Every Super Bowl they make a "Racy" commercial like this which is supposed to drive up the traffic at their server. I haven't checked, but my guess is that nothing actually racy happens if you go to their web page to watch the ending. Porn sites don't advertise on the Super Bowl broadcast. They don't need to, they're porn sites!

I have no idea how GoDaddy can afford a Super Bowl ad each year given that they sell domain names and it seems like every domain name has been taken already. Personally I think GoDaddy is either a money laundering front or else some rich guy's idea of a weird joke.

The interesting thing about these ads is how fame can seriously affect people's perceptions of sexiness and desirability. Danica Patrick, the GoDaddy.com spokeswoman, is a lovely woman but not really an amazing knockout. There are millions of women as pretty as she is, yet because she's kinda famous millions of horny people will flock to a website for the chance to see her in the buff (which I doubt will happen). I guess its the novelty of it.

Heineken - Warrior



What you drink is your destiny? I want to like this commercial but I can see why they wouldn't want to go up against Budweiser by saving it for game time. Even if the message is nice, its a kinda boring and weird ad which wastes John Turturro.

Pepsi Max- Diet Coke is for Pussies

Note: this is a video of a video



Screw you, Pepsi. First of all, physical comedy loses its funny if no one actually gets hurt.

But even worse, this ad relies on that lamest, stupidest and most insulting of ad pitches: use our product, or you're a pussy! Screw you, Pepsi, I've been drinking Diet Coke (and occasionally Diet Pepsi) my entire life, and I LOVE the taste of it. Hell I think I need one right now.

You call you're drink "The first diet soda for men", huh? Given the situations depicted in your commercial, maybe it would be more accurate to call it the first diet soda for idiots. "Oh, I'll stick my head out a limo and get my ripped in half by a parking structure entrance! You know, since we're out celebrating how I didn't kill myself through various other acts of stupidity and negligence today"

If these men are so tough, why are they even drinking a sissy diet cola in the first place? Shouldn't they proudly swill the darkest, sweetest, most unhealthy soda that they can get a hold of, which is probably only available on the black market? Or even better, shouldn't these guys be drinking a real manly drink like Scotch or Bourbon?

Maybe I'm overreacting. I'm gonna go get a Diet Coke.