Super Bowl Ads for the Rest of Us

I don't care about football. There, I said it.

I also typically hate ads, but will tolerate them during "The Big Game" (don't want to get sued by the NFL). Companies spend a boat load of money on those ads, so it seems like they should be the ad industry's A-game, the cream of the crop for the year. And while I think quite a few of those ads are related to beer, pizza/snack foods, and a random mish mash of others, there are a few that even us geeks could appreciate.

I won't sit and watch all the ads from yesterday's game, but overall, I wasn't terribly impressed with the geeky commercials. Granted 30 seconds isn't a ton of time, but considering how much it cost to air those ads, I felt like there were a few that were close, but not quite there. And a few were just terrible.

There was a new Coke ad featuring the Simpsons, with a downtrodden Mr. Burns wandering through Springfield as others frolicked and enjoyed their delicious Cokes. Apu was big-hearted enough to take pity on Mr. Burns and offer him a Coke (in a bottle, I might note) bringing him into the community fold and cheering him up out of his funk.

While I love the Simpsons, I don't think this one was super creative. It's more like a tie-in: if the Simpsons are cool, then by association Coke must be as well. I do like that Spider Pig shows up and that Milhouse gets a line at the end. Overall, I'll give this one a "meh plus."




Several movie trailers appeared, including The Wolfman (which I couldn't get to play), Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and Prince of Persia. I'm interested in all of these movies, but I think I'm the target demographic. So it seems like the point here would be to attract mainstream moviegoers to these sci fi/fantasy outings. I'll reserve judgment on the Wolfman trailer, since I'm planning to see that this weekend and can geek out all about it soon enough.

I've seen the 3D trailer for Alice in Wonderland, which was fantastic! However, the 30 second trailer didn't seem to pick the good highlights, but rather emphasize the freakish fantasy that this movie will likely be. And I'm just not sure at all about Prince of Persia (starring Jake Gyllenhaal). I like Jake, and the CGI looks pretty good, so maybe I'm stuck on the ridiculous hair piece he's wearing. Is that a good enough reason to blow off a movie? It might be. You be the judge.




I enjoyed the Intel Robot ad, if only because the robot reminded me of Wall-E and was cute. I was surprised by the Google ad (does anyone NOT know what Google is?) but I liked it. It was able to tell a story through searches and background noise and I thought that a clever device. I'm easily entertained, what can I say?




Finally, there was one ad for video game Dante's Inferno, but I'd rather leave the review of that one to the experts (I'm looking at you, Erica!). All I can say is that I thought the music choice for the ad was a mis-match.

Bonus: The Bud Light/Lost may be one of the more clever ones in my opinion. I can't even follow Lost anymore, but I know enough about the story to see the allusion in the Bud Light ad, and while silly, it was a fun one. If I were on a deserted island, I'd probably be pretty excited about a stash of beer, at least until it ran out.



Finally, while not a purely geek-oriented ad, the Internet was all a-twitter (yes, I love a bad pun) about the Dave/Oprah/Jay ad. I'm not really sure how this came to be, but since Dave slammed Jay not 2 weeks ago, I guess I'm a little confused. But I like that it's an ad for Dave's show and not Jay's. So there's that. What do you think?



Whew! That was exhausting! I'm so glad this event is only once a year.