Beware, the Green Police are on the lookout!

MITCH BLATT

I cover sports business for JSB, as well as writing general posts, so I figure I should tackle the Super Bowl ads: not just which ones were funniest but which ones did the best job of marketing their products.

However, we will start off with which ones are funniest.

The envelope please…

1.) Brett Favre in 2020 – Hyundai

Not only was it hilarious imagining what Brett Favre will look like 10 years from now when he’s still playing the game, this ad actually related directly to the product it promoted and, I think, connected with the audience. (From thinking about Favre’s 10-year future, the ad transitioned from that uncertainty to the certainty that your Hyundai will still be under warranty. That’s the challenge of Super Bowl ads: They have to entertain the fans while still selling a product. Talking about product features isn’t entertaining.

2.) Green Police – Audi

Also hilarious, and also relates directly to the product, and a good song, too!

Here are some related videos on the Green Police theme from Audi:

Green Police YouTube Channel

3.) Charles Barkley doing Dr. Suess about Taco Bell

Charles Barkley is awesome even without rhyming about Taco Bell. Remember what a star he was in his 2008 T-Mobile Super Bowl ad with Dwyane Wade?

4.) Fiddling Beaver – Monster

Monster has had good ads for the past two years now:

5.) Mr. Burns goes broke – Coke

I thought it would be funny if Abu just gave Burns a Coke and left. Yay, you can be happy just by drinking Coke, not by having good friends!

Now for some other notable ads…

Best marketing campaigns

The best marketing campaign by far this year was Focus on the Family. They announced they were running an abortion-related ad featuring Tim Tebow, and they generated all sorts of controversy for running an advocacy ad during the Super Bowl. As it was, the ad itself simply showed Tebow’s mother sharing her love for Tim (and didn’t mention abortion at all) and told viewers to go to their website for the full story. In effect, they got a whole lot of free publicity to push a message that CBS wouldn’t have allowed to run during the Super Bowl in the first place.

Go Daddy has the best on going marketing campaign, and they continued the same thing this year. They get a good share of (well-deserved) criticism for objectifying women, but when I bought the domain name for Juiced Sports Blog, there was only one registrar I thought of: Go Daddy. Who else is there? There’s a reason Go Daddy dominates the domain name game with 29% of the market share. (Their leading competitor has 8% of the market share.) Go Daddy took a boring product–domain names–and made people talk about it. Not everyone is going to buy a domain name, but with the growth of the internet over the past decade, people already had Go Daddy’s name in their head from the Super Bowl, so when they did decide to buy a domain name, they already knew who sold them.

Weirdest ads

Census ad

It’s not every year that the federal government buys a Super Bowl ad. It was kind of a slow ad without much of a climax. I was disappointed.

There’s a lot of related ads on their YouTube channel like this one:

The commercial is supposed to be a mockumentary, and it includes “interviews” with the characters on YouTube. It’s directed by Christopher Guest, one of the writers of This is Spinal Tap.

Dove for Men

Dove is trying to expand its market to include men. We’ll see how it works:

The target audience for this campaign is older men who are done raising their kids, so I think they might be able to get some of the market. Obviously they’re not going to get any of the market of young men.

Mark Sanchez ad evokes FotF ad?

When this Mark Sanchez ad came on, it grabbed my attention at first, because it sounded like it could be a response to the controversy generated by the Tim Tebow ad. Listen to the first lines (which were said as the sound of a heartbeat was playing): “I’m Mark Sanchez, and I’ve got something to say to women…” (It ended up being an awareness ad of heart attack symptoms.)

On a sidenote, is Mark Sanchez becoming the pretty boy Tom Brady was?

Dr. Pepper KISS ad flop

Dr. Pepper did a really lame ad that wasn’t even much of a change from their regular non-Super Bowl ad rotations featuring Gene Simmons telling people to drink Dr. Pepper, because “he’s a doctor.”

Come on, you’ve got KISS, a band that is older than Brett Favre, and you’ve got The Who doing the halftime show. Dr. Pepper should have used KISS to joke about how old guys always do the halftime show now

Denny’s Only Day of Business All Year

Last year Denny’s gave away free grand slams the day after the Super Bowl, and lots of people went, but I’m not sure anyone returned. Not having improved their food, I’m not sure how they think this year will be any different. One difference is this year Free Grand Slam Day is Tuesday, not Monday, so maybe they were hoping a lot of people would come today, thinking the food was free, then end up actually buying food.

The ad is entertaining, if only to see a chicken sitting in the Oval Office wearing a tie:

VW Fails in Bringing Back 10-Year-Old Trend

Remember when you were 10 years old and you thought it was funny to hit people when you saw a VW Beatle? Well it’s still not funny:

That’s $2.8 million dollar the drain…

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