Sunday, February 1, 2009
Superbowl Ads
Each year, there has been a perceptible dip in the quality of super bowl advertisements, and this year was no exception. Most of the advertisements I saw were non sequiter, and virtually impossible to gain any sense of. Budweiser built an entire ad campaign based off of their ad tagline "Drinkability" as well as the antics of a horse that manages to get up to all sorts of hi jinx, which relates to beer somehow? In a revelation on par with when we discovered Darth Vader was Luke's father, we finally discover what this "Drinkability" business is all about. "Budweiser has drinkability" a bro chirps in the ad, "it's easy to drink!". Well that was certainly... expected. Regardless, enough about alcohol. There were plenty of other non-beer related ads that caught my eye. Such as a pepsi advertisement that was really quite smashing. It featured Bob Dylan's "Forever Young" being performed by him, as well as a more contemporary artist. The song was dubbed over images of 60s nostalgia: hippies, flower power and the like. These are contrasted with more modern images of youth today doing what they do best - being youthful. The ad ends with the tagline "Each generation refreshes the world". Well isn't that profound. Unfortunately for pepsi, I don't see how this relates to pepsi at all. Am I required to drink a soft drink to refresh the world? If my changing the world is contingent on drinking a pepsi, I think I'll prefer to let the world be. I've never really cared for pepsi. At half time we were treated to a delight, three dimensional advertising! What struck me about these ads was the fact that the ads themselves had virtually no substance whatsoever, aside from the fact that they were in 3D. One featured lizards dancing and trippy visual effects. Aside from the obvious fact that they were in 3D, these ads were even worse than the worst of the other superbowl ads. It was a sad commentary on where advertisements in general are heading if this becomes the norm.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Well it sounds a bit like you expect too much out of advertisements, my friend. One of the reasons commercials seem to be getting worse as time goes on is that you are more mature and less willing to suspend your disbelief. Advertisements are worthless pieces of garbage designed to get you to spend hard-earned cash on more worthless pieces of garbage that you really don't need. So expecting them to remain entertaining and novel as you discover more of the world and become less impressionable is comic. However, I did agree. The commercials sucked this year.
Yea I totally agree with you. The commercials were below average this year, but the point of a commercial is not to be entertaining, but is supposed to convince you that their product is the best. Because the Super Bowl has a reputation for having very entertaining ads, often adding humor to ads helps them be remembered for longer periods of time. This, however, did not seem to work this year. I can determine this because you replaced "Budlight" with "Budweiser" thereby giving Budweiser credit for Budlight's ads. This however is a rather weak observation because you, being outside the target audience, do not serve as an adequate example.
Post a Comment