Here’s my annual breakdown of the game and the commercials and the halftime show. Wait. What’s that smell? Oh, it’s the commercials. I thought somebody had left a cheese log out since the college bowl games. All in all, not a good year for our biz on the big one. A nice spot here and there, not unlike the plays in game. A lot of drowning, wet ideas and fumbles as well – not unlike the game. Here goes in order.
Pregame
Not exactly sure what that Fellini-esque pregame menagerie was, with inflatable ostriches and gators and tumblers dressed like Richard Simmons, but I thought I was having a flashback to a Peter Max poster being viewed by Dr. Seuss after downing a tab of LSD. That was flat weird. But better than the commercials around it.
The Game Starts
The Colts’ Tony Dungy versus his old friend Lovie Smith from the Bears – it’s Chicago and Indianapolis – only 188 miles apart, yet the coaches couldn’t be closer.
The NFL commercial about the people, family, friends and towns that spawned the players in the game was a flag-waving national anthem for pro football’s place in American culture. I’m getting an NFL tattoo on my butt tomorrow.
The Colts’ Peyton Manning (does he look like a big Bart Simpson to you, or is it just me?) comes in needing to make an honest woman of his reputation. The Bears’ Rex Grossman comes in looking like that dude who works in accounting who pokes his head in your cube every day asking how it’s going. Chicago middle linebacker Brian Urlacher looks like what would happen if you locked up the lead singer from that old 80s group Midnight Oil in a Gold’s Gym for 24 straight months.
Ronald McDonald House commercial: Not a great spot, but a great cause.
Ford Trucks: Not-too-inspired attempt to get back some of the $12.5 billion Ford lost last year.
“Ghost Rider”: Now I know why Nick Cage said he’ll stop making movies for a while.
NFL Network Spot: Martha Stewart and others. Not bad, oh, pass me the vanilla flavoring.
The National Anthem: I thought I looked old until Billy Joel started singing like an “American Idol” tryout where Simon rips the guy a new one.
“Norbitt”: Another Eddie Murphy movie where he plays every single character.
Pizza Hut: Jessica Simpson smiles and tries to look like Britney Spears with panties on.
Blockbuster: This is the stupidly simple spot where they explain the deal that just may carve a chunk out of Netflix’s rear.
The Edge: Old spot. New Car. I’m humming that darned song.
Ford Super Duty Truck: Special effects has truck floating all around while a guy drones on about how it’s built. I see where some of their 12.5 billion went. (Note to Ford: Call us, we can help spend your money better).
The Bears’ Devin Hester runs back the opening kickoff 92 yards for a TD. First time in Super Bowl history that’s been done. The Bears smile, not knowing what’s gonna happen three hours later. Grossman is grinning because that’s 7 he won’t have to deposit.
Manning gets picked off by Harris and the Colts look like the Tin Man without his oil can.
Bud Light: To get the last Bud Light in an ice chest, two guys play Rock, Paper, Scissors. One guy throws a rock and cold-cocks his pal. I really wanted to laugh. I tried.
Doritos: A Doritos bag is used as, ahhh, uhhh, I think I drifted off there for a second.
Blockbuster: Clicking a mouse. A Real Mouse. Dumb. But I laughed – something I didn’t do in a lot of the other spots.
Sierra Mist: Comb-over guy in shorty shorts. Funny looking. Comb-overs are that way.
Salesgenie.com: I kept waiting for the trunk monkey. Did this thing get lost on its way to its 3 a.m. slot on cable? I have three friends in sales, and they want an apology from the genie for making them look stupid in front of a billion people on the Super Bowl.
Sierra Mist: Again, same guy but no comb-over now. He’s doing a bad Jim Carrey impression in a karate class. Are they drunk? I’m beginning to think there’s a reason why people are saying the Internet and YouTube is killing TV.
Manning tosses a 58-yarder to Wayne, then they fumble the PAT in the rain. Remember the word “fumble”. You will read it a lot in the next few paragraphs.
Toyota Tundra: Okay, yeah, it’s a demo, but I like it. Truck zooms through gate to show power, then slams on the ABS before a gorge. At least it feels like a Super Bowl spot.
FedEx: Moon Office. Interesting idea. Now we’re looking more like Super Bowl commercials.
Bud Light: Auction wedding. I laughed. I like. I’m feeling better about my chosen profession. Nice one.
Bears fumble the kickoff. Colts fumble it back the next play. It’s raining but that’s not a greased pigskin and these guys make millions each to play a game we’d all love to still play for free. Grossman tosses a quick TD to Muhammad and it’s 14-6 Bears over Colts.
Snickers: Yeah, now we’re talking sick. Two mechanics share a Snickers and work their way up the chocolate bar to each other’s lips. They freak out and have to do some manly stuff to make up for their Brokeback moment – like ripping a chunk of chest hair off. I laughed.
CBS network promos compete with fumbles to see which one gets shown the most.
Chevy: People sing popular songs with Chevy in them. Not bad. But this is the Super Bowl.
Bud Light: Classroom learns to speak the Bud Light language. Uh huh, I saw
“Stripes,” too.
CBS promo, I think. Was there one for “CSI”? No, wait, there were 47 for “CSI”.
Bears fumble again. It’s raining harder in Miami. Now we have four turnovers as the first quarter ends.
HoDaddy.com, er, I mean, GoDaddy.com: Sorry. Wet T-shirts in marketing. Yeah, happens all the time. Sex sells. Sux doesn’t.
Coke: Animated spot I’ve seen a lot in theaters. Cool.
More CBS promos. Good grief. Couldn’t sell this time?
The Colts’ Vinatieri does what he does, and it’s 14-9.
Budweiser: Dog is lost in city, sees Bud wagon in parade, gets splashed, jumps on wagon and winks. I’m a sucker for a dog, so I liked it.
Garmin: Somebody clearly had a bad trip while watching an old “Power Rangers” cartoon.
Careerbuilder.com: Corporate America in the jungle. Darts fly. People go down. Sort of funny.
Doritos: Checkout girl and guy make a love connection and there’s a cleanup on aisle one. This is the one that was created by a fan. Says a lot about the pros in our biz, doesn’t it?
Note to CBS: Please invest in some wipes to get the smear off the lenses on your cameras. I know it’s raining and all, but this is the Super Bowl.
Indianapolis runs it in and the score is 16-14.
Bud Light: People getting slapped. I loved this spot. I have to say, for me, it was the best one. Not saying it was great, but in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Beatyourrisk.com: That name could have been a lot worse. So could the spot, which I kind of enjoyed. High Blood Pressure (as a character) attacks Mr. Heart and beats him like Sonny Corleone smacking Carlo in the street.
NFL United Way: At least it’s a good cause.
GM: Auto assembly robot drops a nut and has a nightmare where his life goes down the tubes because of his mistake (“All By Myself” plays to his pain). The message: GM is obsessed with quality. I like it. I just hope they really are, you know, obsessed with quality like that.
Coke: Nostalgic bottle through history. Classic-looking and traditional feel with a cool graphic aftertaste. Nice wallpaper.
By now, Noah is building an ark in section 34 under the scoreboard. Rain is blowing sideways like a cow peeing on a flat rock.
“Wild Hogs”: Movie. Looks funny. Another 9 bucks I’ll be out soon.
Sprint Mobile Broadband: Connectile Dysfunction. Kind of funny if it weren’t so true. I had Sprint for a while. I know how that dysfunction feels on their cell phone coverage. They need to put the people who do their advertising in charge of their customer service. Maybe jokes will help them replace customers like me.
Motorola: I think it was Motorola. Don’t you hate it when you see the spot and can’t remember who the client is?
More CBS promos. More rain. More fumbles. The Colts fumble. The Bears fumble back to them. There are six turnovers so far. Why isn’t KY Jelly sponsoring this thing?
Frito-Lay: A nice little spot celebrating the historic occasion of two African-American head coaches being in the Super Bowl.
Coke: Old man in nursing home who has never had a Coke does other things he’s never done. Seen it before. It’s okay.
What’s this? More CBS promos for their shows? On CBS, by CBS.
Opps, Vinatieri misses. Amazing. He’s been 12 for 12 in the playoffs on FG’s and he misses. It happens. The Bears hang in. It’s 16-14 at the half.
Halftime
Rain, rain, rain. Makes you want to vacation in Miami, doesn’t it?
Ah, just what I was waiting to see: More CBS show promos. This one has David Spade. Oh darn, I will have to miss that show for sure.
Acura: I think it said something about a car.
Pepsi Halftime Show
Prince appears on a stage shaped like the symbol for the artist formerly known as Prince. Now that is some sneaky integrated marketing right there. Fireworks explode like a can of WD-40 on that YouTube video.
On his famous head, Prince is wearing something that looks exactly like what my mom used to wear home from the beauty parlor. It’s kind of boring until he starts up Hendricks’ “Watchtower” and goes into “Best of You,” and then a big curtain starts blowing and we see Prince in backlit silhouette and, while I think he’s playing a strangely-shaped guitar, he also looks a lot like Satan
choking a forked-tailed ferret.
The curtain goes down and Prince dances and sings and somewhere out there Porter Waggoner wants his coat back.
The halftime show ends and there are, you guessed it, more CBS promos. A lot of them over and over. How many different “CSI”’s are there? I thought I saw “CSI”, then “CSI Miami”, then “CSI Rosie O’Donnell” and “CSI Survivor” and “CSI Madden” and, well, there were a lot of them.
Arby’s: Can’t remember a thing they said.
Ford Trucks: Smashes big birthday cake. Not a new one, but I like to watch that.
Second Half
Dodge Grand Caravan: Frog lost in van. Seen it before.
Hard rain is still falling. Is that Morgan Freeman in a boat with Christian Slater in the endzone?
Vinatieri makes it Colts 19-Bears 14.
Disney: “Meet the Robinsons”, animated movie. I loved “Shrek”. This?
E•Trade: Bank robbery in reverse. I like the idea of getting robbed by your bank because it is so darned true.
Coke: Salvador Dali-type spot. Saw it in theaters already, a lot.
More CBS promos. Imagine that.
Bud Light: Gorillas in zoo want to snag Bud Light from delivery guy; a smile for the camera stops them. The smile was the best part. They should have just had the gorillas smiling like that the whole time while they planned their heist.
Revlon: Sheryl Crow is hot. The spot wasn’t.
Bears get the ball back after 56 minutes without it. Geez. Prince got more touches than Grossman, who stumbles for two straight 11-yard losses and fumbles the greased pigskin.
Careerbuilder.com: Corporate life in the jungle. I like the idea of that. Sometimes it was funny.
Taco Bell: Talking Ricardo Montalban lions. I would have laughed in 1981.
Van Heusen: I thought it was a Gillette commercial.
Oh look! A CBS promo! With Brooke Shields, too! She’s what? As tall as Shaq now?
Addai and Rhodes are grinding the yards out for the Colts now, and the Bears’ offense is standing on the sideline wondering when they will get to play in the Super Bowl. Another Colts FG.
Toyota Tundra: Another sort of cool demo out in the desert.
Emerald Nuts: So Robert Goulet messes with your stuff at the office? This is for nuts? If they had him messing with your nuts, now they have a Super Bowl commercial.
T-Mobile: Charles Barkley as Dad. Man, am I old.
FedEx: The names match the people. I liked it, Mr. Turkeyneck.
Nationwide: K-Fed finally gets a job that suits his talents. Nice idea. A Super Bowl spot, finally (although I saw it on YouTube last week).
Bud Light: Hitchhiker. He has an axe. I liked it.
CBS promo again. And again. And again. I’ve seen more “CSI” than Grossman has seen the ball.
Gould kicks a FG for the Bears and the score is 22-17 Colts.
Replay of cameraman getting smacked in the end zone on a Manning pass and landing in a puddle is better than any commercial all night.
Rain is now spitting like Sylvester the Cat as more CBS promos hammer me into oblivion.
Budweiser: Crabs worship ice chest of Bud. Say what? This was voted the best spot of the night? Ouch. Not for me, but it does put the other spots into perspective, doesn’t it? Clearly, most people were drunk by this time.
Prudential: They have a rock, you know.
Honda: Elvis. “Burning Love”. New CRV. Average.
CBS, yeah, promos, I know.
Colts’ Hadden intercepts Grossman and runs it back for TD. The straw that broke the Bears’ butt. There have been seven turnovers so far. Colts 29-17.
HP: “Orange County Choppers”. Not memorable but cool looking.
IZOD: Eye candy.
Bud Select: Don Shula in Vegas…something-or-other.
CBS promos. More smeared lenses. Raining harder.
Colts intercept Grossman again; this time, Sanders does the deed. seventh turnover.
Flomax: Pee too much? This will stop it. But a runny nose as a side effect. Hmmm, stops your pee, runs your nose. It should be called FloLess, not FlowMax. Yeah. I thought so too.
E•Trade: Things to do with one finger, like click the remote when those CBS promos come on.
Oops, too late. More CBS promos. I’ve counted 3,457 so far.
“Hannibal Rising”: Movie. Fava beans. Another 9 bucks I’ll be out.
Careerbuilder.com: More corporate America in the jungle. The dude with the paper clips on his back was pretty funny.
CBS, please, enough with the freakin’ promos!
Honda: Passing gas pumps in desert. Nice demo.
GoDaddy.com: Same spot.
Snapple: ECGC, green tea. Okay.
Colts win, 29-17. Dungy and Smith hug. It rains.
NFL: Hard to say goodbye.
Maybe not. Here’s another CBS promo about “CSI Miami”. I guess they’re investigating the drowning deaths and the commercials that were DOA on the field during the Super Bowl.
Tags: Advertising, Commercials, Famous People, Superbowl, Television