Super Bowl – The Day After

The nation’s most important day for television advertising has passed, a football game got played, and now the analysis begins.  Here’s a few thoughts on yesterday’s event:

In my mind, and many others, the one clearly best commercial of the evening was the Eminem/Chrysler tribute to Detroit.  It was a two-minute commercial that did everything a Super Bowl commercial should – It was great film, it grabbed people’s attention, and it said something unique and positive about the brand it was promoting.

In my mind, it was the best Super Bowl commercial I’ve seen since Apple’s 1984 commercial that introduced the Mac.  (We’ll talk some more later this week about these ads and why I think they were great.  Feel free to contribute to the dialog on this through the comments. Oh, and here’s a source of all the commercials that ran during yesterday’s game.)

Defining the worst commercial to me was equally easy.  There were plenty of offensive ads – Go Daddy denigrating women, beer ads denigrating women, the Doritos ad I didn’t see – but for me the Groupon ad featuring Timothy Hutton seemingly talking about the plight of people in Tibet but actually promoting Groupon restaurant discounts was the worst.

Why?

Because it is making light of  the persecution and murder of a people in order to sell a service.  It’s one thing to mock the green save-the-whales or save-the-rainforest movements, mocking murder is quite another.  Yes, I know Groupon is raising money for Tibet.  To me, it doesn’t matter. (Just look at the response to fashion maven Kenneth Cole’s joking tweet about the Egyptian riots.)

The broadcast started off with the controversy of Christina Aguilera botching the national anthem.  Color me not amazed.  Way too many pop stars have botched our anthem in one way or another over the years.  I was reminded this morning by my friend Charley Reed of the brilliant a cappella version sung by Huey Lewis & the News before the 1984 baseball all-star game.  Now that’s how you do it:

While the halftime show by the Black Eyed Peas attracted considerable debate over Twitter and Facebook, in that case the response was fairly evening divided.  Though, apparently, Hitler was not impressed. (Needless to say, NSFW language in subtitles….)

More tomorrow.