Opinion
Super Bowl ads a disappointment
February 5, 2009
The Super Bowl, the pinnacle of football every year, was this past weekend and as always, not only do we see the two best teams from each conference, we also see great advertisements from so many different companies.
Super Bowl XLIII brought us this year’s installment of what are always claimed to be great ads. However, this year, like many other years in the recent past was a disappointment.
The advertisements used and made for this game were made up of about 30 percent of commercials that have already aired on regular television. I can remember back to when the Super Bowl meant the Mecca of television ads and now we’re stuck with junk during the breaks of the game. Many ads that are just not good enough to have on during a Super Bowl that were shown during this year’s big game included a heavy dose of car commercials.
These ads included different brand cars for sale as well as an Enterprise commercial that depicted a mother and her son using Enterprise Rent-A-Car to get somewhere.
The Enterprise commercial was shown several times and is a commercial that had debuted before the big game. This made that ad a joke, while at the same time begs the question how much does Enterprise think they have to spend on their television ads?
I can remember when the chameleons were teamed up with the frogs for the Budweiser commercials. Those ads were great and everyone who saw them over and over will remember them.
Unlike the new stream of Geico ads that feature Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me,” and have a bundle of cash that follows a helpless victim who is apparently spending too much on their car insurance, these ads are just not entertaining unless you’re a big Rockwell fan.
However, there were some bright moments—the Doritos’s ads were both appealing and funny. They were able to catch my attention and then delivered a good laugh. One specific ad showed two coworkers talking about how they could have free Doritos at work, and then one throws something into the vending machine to get free Doritos really made me laugh and I know many of you out there laughed as well.
The biggest disappointment during the big game was that freecreditreport.com failed to launch a new ad during the big game. Now I don’t want to make people too mad and act as though I am advertising freecreditreport.com but, we all have to consider that this site can help people with finding their credit scores and the ads are always entertaining and can generate a laugh or even force people to sing along. I know from personal experience that my roommates and I all sing along to the freecreditreport.com ads all the time.
All in all, the big game featured big bust ads. They were poorly made and featured several ads that were played multiple times; there is no excuse for this to happen on Super Bowl Sunday. While ads shown were played over and over and lacked originality and even effort, some ads just were played at the wrong time.
When looking back at this past Super Bowl Sunday I can look around me and see that the United States, as well as much of the world, is suffering from economic troubles—so playing a commercial for a brand new car over and over just seems to be a bit out of line. Not many people can afford to pay their mortgage and now you want them to buy a new car? That’s absolutely ridiculous!
Gary Klaput is a student at UW-River Falls.