Superbowl XLI Commercials

January 23rd, 2007 - - Filled in: Business/Consumer

It’s that time of year again. Super Bowl commercials, not to mention I don’t have to hear Sean Salsbury tell us how much he wants to hump Tom Brady’s leg (no offense, Tom). CBS is charging a little over $2.6 million for every 30-second spot. But while most companies will hire professionals to do their dirty work, others have called on its consumers to come up with a good idea. Why not…you know…in the era of reality shows and American Idol. Hmm. Sounds like a bad idea to me. Alka Seltzer, Frito Lay (Doritos), GM (Chevrolet), and the NFL Network (my new favorite network) are among those who held a contest to come up with an idea for their commercial. And from what I’ve seen so far, it didn’t look like they had many great submissions. Of course, they’ll save the best for the Super Bowl, but I’m just not excited about those. I’m certain that most viewers will be excited about seeing the GoDaddy.com girl. Gary Parsons mentioned on The Big Idea with Donny Deutch that GoDaddy’s market share went from 16% to 22% after the Super Bowl ads were aired. GoDaddy was recently dropped by its ad agency citing ‘creative differences’; and, CBS has already rejected 2 of GoDaddy’s submissions to date. As a guest on “Hannity & Colmes” with Kirsten Powers (I’m a huge fan, BTW…rrrrAHHrrr), Gary announced the 2nd rejection and provided a sneak peek into the 3rd attempt. The second interpretation can be seen here.

There’s even a guy, who calls himself JP to remain anonymous, that was trying to raise money to buy a 30-second spot to use to propose to his girlfriend. In the most recent post on his blog, My Super Proposal, titled “Fear of Notoriety”, JP talks about answering a variety of questions from would-be advertisers/sponsors. JP’s blog was even featured on ABC’s Good Morning America for about 90 seconds back on January 10th. He has since scrapped the main goal and plans to donate the proceeds to charity. You can monitor his progress here. Maybe Mastercard can roll JP and his girlfriend into one of its “Priceless” ads instead of the chum they’ve been coming up with lately.

Over the years, the Super Bowl commercials have varied in quality. When the economy was in a bind, commercials were relatively unimpressive. Budweiser sent the Clydesdales to New York where they bowed their heads in observance of 9/11 in 2002. Nonetheless, some of my favorites include (in descending order):

While the Apple commercial is perhaps the popular favorite, my hands down favorite was Reebok’s Terry Tate commercial…and the series that followed.