Media Two Interactive

Super Bowl 2012 Advertising

Yes, there are plenty of critics in the world, so I won’t pretend to be perfect – but here’s some of my high-level wondering’s on this years Super Bowl, and more importantly, the commercials that aired throughout.

  • Hands down, my favorite spot was the Chrysler “It’s Halftime in America” with Clint Eastwood.  It was pointed out to me that it was very similar, if not a take off of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign “It’s Morning Again in America” – which, to me only makes it that much better.  A powerful message, and although I’m guessing a lot of people aren’t running out and buying Chrysler’s this morning, I am certain that the brand awareness behind Chrysler today is through the roof.
  • Local advertising spots were the big losers in my eyes. I know you’re not paying the millions that others are for the national exposure, but what if you did a new commercial that was relevant, or heck, even a good commercial for the Super Bowl.  The majority of the audience would have no idea that it’s a local spot and that you didn’t pay ga-zillions of dollars for it, giving your brand just that much more impressive of a feature.  Or, you could hire a has-been to shout really loud.
  • Really NBC?  You could’t figure out how to run your mandatory censoring of the halftime show?  I’m not going to say her name in the post, because her flipping the bird to the camera and swearing were enough of a teaching moment for my 5-year-old and 8-year-old that I don’t want her getting any more attention than she deserves.  Call me old school, but I miss being able to watch sports with my kids.
  • Again – showing how old I am…   I enjoyed the Madonna performance. There, I said it.  It’s supposed to be a family event, so it can’t be over the top, yet it has to be entertaining and appeal to a wide range of audiences.  Oh yeah, and she’s 50-what?  Good for you Madonna!  There were a lot of haters on social – but I saw just as many who loved it…
  • Speaking of Social – it was the first time I watched the Super Bowl with my friend @twitter.  Completely different experience – and I’m glad I wasn’t cheering for one side or the other, or it would have been impossible to watch the game and my Twitter stream.  The instant feedback on the commercials, the commentary, the plays – it was pretty cool.  Even when I put my kids down to bed, I knew I had to get back and see the Chrysler spot as the Twitter-verse was blowing up.  Next year I envision a stream at the bottom of my TV, similar to scores/tickers, that displays who I’m following – maybe even a “now trending” that I can click on and it brings up a PIP of the game and my social network of choice.
  • There were a lot of complaints about the quality of the commercials…  Although I didn’t love them – I wondered if it had a lot to do with the fact that most were pre-released before the Super Bowl.  One local spot you might not have seen was Will Farrell’s mockery of advertising.  Take notice of the intentionally low-def camera, the tag line not starting until the 30-second spot is over, etc…  Classic!  How did you miss it?  Oh – you weren’t in Nebraska watching last night.
  • GoDaddy was starting to lose some support, and then David Beckham rolled out his…  Well – I have no idea what he rolled out, but my wife loved it.  The point being, people still didn’t care for GoDaddy but most started to forget to tweet about it (or were concerned about being called a hypocrite).  Of course, not to be out-done, TeleFlora came out with Adriana Lima for their own bit of sex appeal.  The difference between this and Go Daddy was more about class, but the message was the same and although I couldn’t find it in my stream from last night – my favorite tweet about it was “I don’t know who TeleFlora is, but I’m guessing some kind of escort service”.  Priceless.
  • And my finally learning of the night was that a Stylus is cool again – who knew? As much as I find the Samsung features and benefits misguided, I think the overall campaign was brilliant.  They started a while back with a true campaign, and concluded with a well done Super Bowl commercial that played off of everything they built up from.  Whether they can grab some market share over Palm Pilot is yet to be seen :) .

The interesting thing for me on all of this is how will social media play into the future – specifically Twitter.  I’m not much of a Facebook guy, but I’d be hard pressed to believe that Facebook got as much play as Twitter did during the course of the entire night.  Remains to be seen if there’s more integration for years to come.

Scroll to Top