But What About the Commercials?

So the Big Game is over: I actually watched the whole thing this year. Had a cool time with a bunch of the guys (If you're reading: Thanks, Jon! Great shindig). But of course the real story each year isn't who won and who lost, but the ridiculously expensive lavish commercials. At $2M a spot, its gotta be crazy... huge numbers of the ads were for dotcoms and soda. What were your favorites? The E*Trade Monkey ad was my favorite, followed by the Mountain Dew leopard ad and the 7up ad where the truck hit the machine.

Re:Commercials are great

I love being unnecessarily cynical about everything that people do! When on Slashdot, I love to flaunt my obvious superiority by putting down the actions of mindless cretins who dare to have a little fun! I enjoy pointing out that because large corporations do some bad things, everything they do must be inherently evil by association and nothing they create can thus be of any value whatsoever! I really relish insisting that everything everyone does must be global, that no one is allowed to talk about things that are going on in their own country! In fact, I should yell at myself because I'm talking about me, and I only exist in the country I live in. But it doesn't matter, because I'm superior to all of you! Long live unmitigated cynicism! Down with fun!

Everybody in no pants GAP spoof

My favorite commercial today wasn't even on the Superbowl--it was on Cartoon Network's "The Big Game."

For those of you that missed it, it was a spoof of the GAP "Just can't get enough" leather ad. A bunch of toons are singing the song, with the same weird cuts and shots as the GAP ad. There's Yogi Bear, Booboo, Cow, Chicken, The Red Guy, I.R. Baboon, and a bunch of old Hanna Barbera toons. When the song's over, the following flashes on the screen:

Everybody in no pants.

And then it cuts to I.R. Baboon and Cow mooning the camera. Basically, all the toons in the commercial were those that regularly appear without pants.

Cartoon Network always has the best promo commercials, IMHO. ^_^

Re:The E*trade Monkey

E*Trade definitely has some of the funniest commercials out there. My personal favorite has to be the "Blow'd Up" ad; it starts out as an advertisement for a "$200 million blockbuster" starring Anna Nicole Smith and George Takei (Sulu from Star Trek, playing the megalomanical bad guy), and features lots of stuff getting blown up (including, improbably, a picnic basket). Tagline: "This movie's gonna blow." Then we realize someone's watching the ad on TV, and he liquidates his shares in TriMount Studios, the distributor of the movie.

I have to say, though, the best ad I saw this Superbowl was the Herding Cats one, even though I can't remember what it was for anymore.

Commercials online

Yahoo has the commercials available online in Windows Media player format (?) and RealVideo.

http://promotions.yahoo.com/promotions/superspots/ [yahoo.com]

Re:Commercials are great

Yeah, it's even more amusing when the teams that are playing deserve to burn in hell. Both of them stabbed their hometowns in the back less than 5 years ago. They're the worst thing about modern professional sports. They represent the team owners today who bilk cities for millions of dollars in blackmail tax subsidies, do nothing to hepl the local economies, and have no city loyalty, even though they themselves depend on hometown loyalty to fill stadium seats.

Well, in the case of the Rams, you couldn't be more wrong. The ones without loyalty were the fans in LA--or the prodigious lack of them. Why do you think the nation's second largest TV market lost both of their football teams within a year (the Rams to St. Louis and the Raiders back to Oakland)?? Because nobody in LA cared about football. Sure, the Rams were a mediocre team...but their attendence the last few years was abyssmal. Indeed, no one even lifted a finger to stop either team from moving.

Meanwhile, the Rams sold out nearly every game in St. Louis for the past 5 years--and believe me, they sucked for the first four of them. As for the assertion that neither of these teams has helped the local economies, that's clearly absurd. And even more than that, getting to a Super Bowl unites a city and makes it exciting to live in (if St. Louis can ever be called that...but that's another story) in important if not economically quantifiable games.

Both of these teams played their hearts out all season and in tonight's great game. Don't you have anything better to do than disparage them?

Re:The E*trade Monkey

This site [superbowl-ads.com] shows a picture of "the herding cats one" (search page for "cats") and says it's for Electronic Data Systems [lanl.gov]. Unfortunately, I missed the ad.. could you give a description of the ad itself?

--

/. should have its commercial!

Yeah, everyone pitch it to make 2 million dollars so /. can advertise its Web site and get itself /.'ed ;)!

The E*Trade Ass: Even Better

Everyone's talking about the monkey, and I agree, the monkey was hilarious, but I definitely think the one with the guy going to the hospital. They took a common American phrase that's being uttered more and more these days, "He's got money coming out the wazoo!" and made a brilliant commercial about it.

"Does he have health insurance?"
"What are you talking about? He's got money coming out the wazoo!"

The monkey was just another one of the cheap commercials with a more creative tagline. The ass commercial actually made a very strong humorous play on the amount of money floating around in our economy these days.

And speaking of asses, 7-Up goes from 'Make 7-Up Yours', which is pretty funny, to 'Show Me Your Cans', which is even funnier. They have some good spots now as well.

*clink* *clink*

NOTE: This post may not be allowed through by certain web filters. If you are using such a web filter, it is your loss.

The E*trade Monkey

Ok, for those of you who missed it, heres the most awesome commercial on this years Commercial Bowl.

A chimp is standing on a box, wearing an etrade tshirt. There are 2 clearly senile old men sitting next to him. Some annoying song starts playing, and the men start clapping along while the monkey flails about and screams a bunch. This goes on for 25 seconds.

At this point, all of america is saying "This is the dumbest commercial I've ever seen."

Then it cuts to a text screen.

"We just wasted 2 million dollars. What are you doing with your money? E*Trade.com"



An interesting side note: There was a football game worth watching interspersed in all the commercials. I was confused.

---

"What is that sound its making?"

Commercials are great

I love commercials! Clever and entertaining ways for large, rich corporations to overtly and/or subliminally influence my thought patterns are a great reason to turn on a television that I try to avoid as much as possible. When discussing commercials, I really enjoy pretending that everyone in the world watches in the same country and sees the same commercials and assuming that everyone knows what "the Big Game" is or even what sport I'm referring to. Long live powerful corporations with authoritarian internal structures that make a farce of democratic representation!

relive the magic

I dont know which was my favorite, but did anyone else notice how many lame .com commercials there were? Personally I'm getting sick of the corporate internet. However, if you want to relive all the great commercials, check out www.adcritic.com [adcritic.com], where you can view commercials in Quicktime and rate them. Not just for the superbowl but always.

Re:Dieing of geekdom and slashdot?

The above comments are not necessarily flames or anything else however does sporting minutiae such as the super bowl actually count as something that is technically noteworthy? Theoretically if the entire human race is enslaved by reptilian creatures from the planet zoron it shouldn't appear on slashdot unless they make the drivers that run their spaceships opensource and run on linux.

You know, I always thought that /.'s slogan was "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters. For a large part of the general population (and even some nerds) Super Bowl Sunday has become an unofficial holiday, focusing around a sporting event, which has become a Pretty Big Place to introduce the masses to some nifty technology (someone's already mentioned the 1984 Apple Macintosh ad, I'm sure).

To be honest, I really didn't think that /. would even mention the Super Bowl, but it's not like we're discussing the game here. The post IMHO is more than justifiable as stuff that matters, at least to some.

Interesting Movie Trailers

Pitch Dark is supposed to be a tepid aliens ripoff. Beh...

Mission to mars is getting extremely good script reviews and the SFX look stellar. Not very sciency or whatall, but looks original at least. I will be in line.

U-571 is supposed to be very good to excellent. I will be in line too.

Re:descriptions? please?

Product: Mountain Dew
Scene: The Serengti.

Cheeta (Think! It doesn't make sense if it was leopard.) running. Mountain biker chases, catches up, does a cowboy-dismount on the cheeta and wrestles it to the ground. Sticks ihis arm down the the cheeta's throat and pulls out a Mountain Dew can.

[cut to mountain biker's friends]

"See that's why I'm not a cat person."

adcritic.com

they have quicktimes of all the commercials up.

Re:Dieing of geekdom and slashdot?

Want something technically noteworthy? Then tell me all about how that yellow line for the first down works. It pans with the camera, is sometimes but not always on the replays, and disappears at a players feet as if it is actually painted on the field.

The Ads are worth the investment!

Yes, SuperBowl ads are rediculously expensive, but they are worth the price.

For example, OurBeginning.com, which spent over $3.5 million dollars, saw a spike on their web site today, from 40 connections per second to over 500 connections per second
(see http://www.newsalert.com/bin/story?StoryId=Cojpfub Kby teWmJu&Topic=Internet-News&Nav=na-search-&StoryTit le=Internet-News [newsalert.com])

Another advantage of the commercials is name/brand recognition. According to an article (http ://abcnews.go.com/sections/business/DailyNews/supe rbowl_netads_000113.html [go.com]) on ABCNews.com, HotJobs.com, which had commercials in last year's SuperBowl, found it was much easier to raise VC funds. To quote the article:

HotJobs.com CEO Richard Johnson said the name brand recognition earned from the Super Bowl commercial last year made it easier to raise funds from venture capitalists. The company's revenues for the first nine months of 1999 jumped from $2.2 million to $12.1 million for the same period in 1998

I find it funny, though, that the vast majority of the commercials were .com related. It seemed all commercials fit into one of three categories:

• .com/Technology
  
• Beer/Soda
  
• Cars

One thing I thought was interesting, were the couple of commercials geared towards women (the Oxygen.com commercial, for example). That seems like wasted money, since the demographics for the SuperBowl viewer, I'd assume, are heavily skewed toward the male gender.

My favorites

EDS Cat Herders (Score:5, Funny)

7up Exploding Vending Machine (Score:4, Funny)

computer.com helped daddy learn how to download pictures (Score:4, Funny)

e*trade "Guy Jumping out Window" (Score:3, Funny)

e*trade "Money Out the Wazoo" (Score:2, Funny)

The game (Score:1)

MicroStrategy (Score:0, Redundant)

monster.com "The Road Not Taken" (Score:0, Offtopic)

Microsoft E-Business (Score:-1, Troll)

Half-time show (Score:-2, Kill me now)

Re:e*jobs

I look forward to the time day that the Internet is no longer an off-beat thing. I heard a quote, "In a few years e-commerce will just be commerce and the letter E will resume it's role as the fifth letter of the alphabet."

I can't wait.