Monday, February 2, 2009

Who Are The Ad Wizards Who Came Up With That One?

Super Bowl. Good stuff, huh? It was a terrific game, but I'm not going to talk about it right now. Maybe ever.

I'd rather talk about the commercials right now. We've reached a point where everyone knows that the commercials are a main part of the fun. So much so that people actually gripe when the commercials aren't entertaining enough. This is a partial by-product of a long stretch when the big game was usually a big snooze. But also because the price of advertising was so high that companies shot for the moon in terms of commercial production values and creativity. And still do, of course.

We're well into the backlash, but one of the big pre-broadcast stories was in my previous post. PETA. Yeah. So I prognosticated that we'd be seeing plenty of ads that could be considered prurient in the same way that the nixed PETA ad was. Didn't take long. There were two of them before the opening kickoff.

Here's #1: A man bites into a brand-name tortilla chip and this causes a woman's clothing to come flying off. The ad's name? "Lucky Day". Other "lucky" things happen to the man in addition to this. But still.

Doritos: Lucky Day


Say what you will about how degrading the PETA ad is (and I'll agree). And we are comparing 30 full seconds of veggie sex with a brief crunch-and-flash at the top of a larger ad. But at least in the first the women were choosing to have sex with the broccoli. Which is more demeaning?

#2 was from the ever-reliable GoDaddy. What can you say? It's blatant. This was the first of at least two ads that promised a racy conclusion if you'd just log on to their website after the commercial. (For the record, I didn't. I was watching the game. Still haven't. Don't intend to get sucked in.)

Godaddy.com: Enhanced


Bimbos! They're funny! And look at those....hey, Danica Patrick's an athlete, you know. If she had tits, they'd be displayed just as prominently as the other two. Four. Whatever. Believe me, she's not opposed to it.

So, say what you will about PETA. (Again, I'll agree with you. They're nuts.) But their ad was not kept off the air because it was too racy or too demeaning to women. NBC has no problem with those things. It was kept off the air because of who PETA is and because its raciness and sexism was used to sell something they weren't interested in selling.

Just for the record, there was one ad that I found hilarious. Here it is. Enjoy!

Career Builder: It's time


I particularly like the nonplussed koala. Although "Hey, Dummy!" is nice too.

2 comments:

Mrs. Chili said...

I'm often astounded - and not in a good way - by the commercials I see on t.v. Seriously? That's what people are getting paid thousands of dollars for?

You're right about the PETA ad - that it was banned had nothing to do with the sex in it.

Kizz said...

I haven't watched the GoDaddy one but I'm assuming that, while there was sexual content, it was there for a shorter time frame. PETA was getting dinged for being unpopular nutjobs but they were being dinged on a long-standing rule about x seconds of x amount of nudity being acceptable while x+1 seconds is not. The censors know PETA is crazy because it takes one to know one.