Is there any question who the biggest loser of the night is?
No, there’s not. It’s Anheuser-Busch. What a pathetic bunch of ads. Really, all, yes ALL of them sucked ass. Maybe not the worst of the night, but when you’re spending 20 million dollars or so within a couple hours of advertising, I’d expect to see at least one memorable thing. They came close with the false Dalmatian spot, as it at least looked promising in the beginning. Unfortunately, it fell pathetically flat.
And, in the loser’s lounge, AB is joined by Sales Genie, Revlon, Garmin, FedEx, and cars in general. Also, Doritos proved my theory that advertiser-backed CGC is fucking dead. Thank the lord. Seriously, I’ve never been so annoyingly bored. The Sales Genie ad below gets worst ad of the night. Did an agency create this, or some in-house hack? On the biggest advertising stage in the world, probably not a good idea to waste our time with this filth.
The big winners for me were Careerbuilder.com and Coke. CB.com for flawlessly replacing the monkey spots with another campaign oozing with legs. From strategy to execution, spot on. And, Coke for probably the best group of ads on the night. Of course, most of us had already seen them on the web, but regardless, they’re brilliant. All of them set this smile-inducing tone that’s hard as shit to pull off without sounding cheesy. I think it’s safe to say that Wieden has overtaken CP&B as the best creative agency in the states.
My top 8.
1) Coke – Give a Little Love
2) Careerbuilder.com – Office Survivor
3) Careerbuilder.com – Promotion Pit
4) Coke – Old Coke Revisited
5) Coke – Fantasy
6) ETrade – Bank Robbery
7) Sierra Mist – Beard Combover
8) Snickers – Kiss
And, the honorary win goes to MySpace.com for putting these all together in one place, and allowing for easy embedding. Seriously, why the fuck would anyone use cbs sportsline if they only offer real player and no embed code? Just fucking stupid.
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but it sure did seem like a ton of CBS promos. Some empty inventory maybe? All in all, a distressing night for traditional ad-men all across the world, and a few hours of content smuggery from new media mavens such as myself and most of you.
**Update: YouTube also has a nifty little super bowl ad round-up here. But, since coke didn’t upload all of their ads, and the absolute fools at careerbuilder.com disabled embeding, I couldn’t switch them all over. Now I feel bad for rating their ads so highly. What a dumbass amateur mistake. I feel bad for giving them extra exposure if they don’t really want it.