and this in fact WAS one of those - it was either a medical deal, or a careerbuilder.com commercial - however if I hadn't been distracted by the fact that I was at a big big party (150 or so ppl.) and was actually in charge of some stuff I might know. This was the only part that I could really pay attention to.

Dave

Dave, the frogs were great, but I liked humor of the old "Sweden olympic Swim suit Team" commercials.

Yep - they just aren't doing like they used to. It's really kind of sad.

Dave

My favorite funny ad was the Bud Light "Magic Fridge".
The coolest one was the Toyota Pickup tossed around in the surf, then driving away.

I need to find a link to them so I can watch the ones I missed.

Edit:

Heres the link to view some of the commercials

Fabio, the life comes at ya fast,, laughed my a@@ off
Nationwide insurance Mr Cline.. I think ...

Well I liked the "Chimps" and the robot having the baby hummer.

JJK

@ fldave

Thanks for the link. I really enjoyed those commercials.

In Denmark we have a saying
- We have so many creative people in Denmark. It is only a shame they don't make commercials.

Ayath

Nationwide insurance Mr Cline.. I think ...

Actually, no... it was for Ameriquest Mortgage. Another failed commercial, if you can't remember what it was for, then Ameriquest wasted $5 million dollars to air the spot.

For what it's worth, all of the spots can be seen at www.ifilm.com

John

I'm at the other end of the spectrum from John (again) -- sorry John! I'm an ex-football player, so I watch them all. For the past 5-6 years I actually edit the commercials I like and make a DVD, along with the highlights.

This year's commercials were some of the worst, no matter what measure you use. Of course, the measure usually used by the general public (which includes me), is how creative and "memorable" the ad was (even if it totally fails the usual advertising measurement tests, like "unaided recall" or "brand recall" or "brand preference," etc.).

I agree with the original post that the Ameriquest Mortgage company had the most creative and funny ad with the fly zapped by the defrib machine. Equally as creative was the Fed-Ex commercial that used the extensive CGI to create a modern version of the classic "Bambi Meets Godzilla" cartoon.

However, overall the ads were really bad. I was so disappointed that I actually pulled out some of my DVDs from previous years and looked at the highlights from years past, just to see if perhaps I was being too harsh in my evaluation. My conclusion? There is no comparison. The Pepsi and Bud ads of the past -- as already mentioned with the description of the Bud frogs -- were far more creative, memorable and, I suspect, effective.

And of course, the grand-daddy of them all -- that ran only one time -- and which started the whole Superbowl ad craze, the Macintosh 1984 ad, is still amazing, even by modern standards.

I thought the bud streaker commercial was good, brought back some High School memories I can't really talk about.

hehehehe

>I thought the bud streaker commercial was good, brought back some High School memories I can't really talk about.<

Man I hope those memories involved streaking and not sheep!!! : 0 )

Actually di any body else around the country have sound issues, the whole thing was in dobly2.0 on my high def channel, not 5.1 like normal, the crowd noise seem subdude and the music feeds sounded like crap!!

epirb, the writer of this article obviously agrees with you about the audio issues :-)

A quote:
"Beginning with the opening bars of the national anthem, even those with nearly deaf ears could immediately perceive that something had gone terribly wrong."

Mike

Although the Pepsi ads really sucked, the one with the stunt double was pretty clever. (The Coke can was the stunt double)

I had a chance to Tivo the commercials tonight, and agree that they weren't that good. And the halftime show--yuk.

Although Portland is only a couple of hours south of Seattle, I didn't have any favorite team, but man, did Seattle get robbed with that touchdown call--here's one instance where having 10 camera views of the same event really paid off in retrospect. The ball never made it to the line. I'm just glad the game wasn't decided based on only that lousy call.

On second thought, I enjoyed the Burger King commercial, with the tomato, bun, meat patty, etc. Absurd enough to be funny.