Best and Worst of Super Bowl Ads

I feel strange making a post about the Super Bowl ads and not the game itself but this year's contest was pretty boring anyway. The first half was one of the sloppiest displays I'd seen from either team all season long. After the recent string of great Super Bowls, I was afraid that we'd exhausted our good luck. Looks like my fears proved to be correct... That's about all I have to say about this year's game, so I'm going to talk about the ads now.

My favorite ad of the Super Bowl is the same as Philo's: the FedEx spot detailing the necessary ingredients for a supposedly successful commercial. It encapsulated everything that's right and wrong about today's advertising agencies (with more tongue-in-cheek emphasis on the latter). The brilliant thing about this approach is that FedEx simply needed to employ all the stupid, unfunny things it was trying to ridicule in order to create a funny ad for their purpose. Let's just hope that no one attempts a similar angle next year, because that would be truly unfunny.

Two other favorites of mine are the Ford Mustang convertible teaser and the Frito Lay ad featuring MC Hammer. Both started off dull and predictable, but the Mustang punchline voiceover was so impeccably delivered and the kids throwing Hammer back over the fence was so laughably crass that I had to give my approval at the end of those ads.

As for the worst, offensively unfunny ads, my picks would be the GoDaddy.com ad with the pitch girl whose top strap breaks at a censorship hearing and the Bud Light cockatoo ad where the bird gets rid of a bar creep for a single girl. The first one wasn't funny or daring in any way whatsoever, and, as Philo so passionately railed, a talking animal is not funny in of itself. Get rid of them, please...