This year’s Super Bowl ads were lame – and critics blame the pandemic



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The latest victim of the pandemic? This year’s Super Bowl ad crop.

Most Super Bowl LV commercials succumbed to the typical Super Sunday traps, critics said – they were either too sure and trained, or they were bogged down with celebrities and bad ideas. Pundits blamed production challenges and tightrope advertisers had to walk amid the divided political climate and rising COVID death toll.

“Every year in Super Bowl advertising there’s the good, the bad and the ugly,” said Rob Schwartz, managing director of advertising agency TBWA Chiat Day. “This year there was not enough good and there was more ugly.

A key exhibit was the advertisement for Scott’s Miracle-Gro which – despite being one of the few places to allude to the pandemic, claiming the backyards were “all a year old” – got bogged down with a weird celebrity mix of Martha Stewart, NASCAR driver Kyle Busch and an almost unrecognizable John Travolta.

“It was a train wreck,” Schwartz said. “The Super Bowl is a celebrity arms race, but the problem is the random celebrity of the backyard garden party. I thought, “What am I looking at?” It was very confusing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QKt8GtRUOA

In addition to the myriad of dark and taboo headlines from the past year, advertisers have been forced this year to tackle the persistent “hype” and pressure that comes with getting a Super Bowl spot and the high price of $ 5.5 million for a 30 second ad, he told me.

“The amount you pay alone makes people conservative,” Schwartz said. “Everyone is looking at what has been successful in the past: celebrity, puppy and baby.”

This may have been a problem for the Robinhood trading app, which fumbled with an ad that was clearly crafted before the recent GameStop frenzy. Using images of ordinary people doing normal things like petting a stranger’s dog, jogging, and FaceTiming with a friend, Robinhood tried to appeal to everyone.

“You don’t have to become an investor, you were born,” the narrator concludes.

Calling the 30-second spot a “real flop,” the executive said, “Robinhood actually committed the biggest sin in the Super Bowl Spot. What they did was boring. If you’re boring, you’re done. .

In contrast, Reddit, also at the center of the recent frenzy of the shopping spree scandal, had a unique and disruptive five-second ad that ran images as if it were an auto ad before posting a text:

“If you’re reading this, that means our bets have paid off,” the post read. “One thing we learned from our communities last week is that underdogs can accomplish just about anything when we come together around a common space.

Another scent was the Fiverr spot that featured the Four Seasons Total Landscaping company in Philadelphia where, in an apparent mistake, Rudy Giuliani hosted a press conference for Trump’s presidential campaign instead of the Four Seasons hotel. The ad featured landscaping company president Marie Siravo driving a futuristic golf cart through the now famous garage driveway to reveal a lush botanical dream landscape filled with busy workers. occupying butterflies and waterfalls.

In addition to being polarizing, Fiverr’s ad lacked clarity on who Siravo is, what Fiverr does and where his company fits in, said Bill Oberlander, co-founder and executive creative director of the ad agency. Oberland.

“There’s a saying, ‘it’s a long way to go for a ham sandwich,’” Oberlander said. “If these are the hurdles you have to overcome to get your point across, maybe it’s not worth a Super Bowl commercial.

M & M’s generally got top marks for their funny ad, featuring Dan Levy, in which a bag of M & M’s is offered as an apology.

“I’m sorry I explained,” said a man, while offering a bag of M&M to a young woman.

“That’s when a man is,” he said before the woman interrupted him to continue explaining. “I know what it is,” she said.

GM’s ad pushing Americans to buy more electric cars, which featured Will Ferrell and fellow comedians Kenan Thompson and Awkwafina, also got Oberlander’s top marks for his ability to humorously weave a message focused on people. Goals.

Currently, Norway outperforms the United States in electric car sales. “Well, I won’t take it,” Ferrell said, hitting a globe in the ad. “With GM’s new Ultium battery, we’re going to crush these lugers. Crush them! Let’s go to America. “

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