The last victim of the pandemic? This year’s Super Bowl ad harvest.
Most of the Super Bowl LV commercials succumbed to the typical Super Sunday traps, critics said: either they were overly confident and formulated, or they were crammed with celebrities and bad ideas. Experts blamed production challenges, as loose rope advertisers had to walk away given the divided political climate and rising COVID deaths.
“Every year, in Super Bowl advertising, there’s the good, the bad, and the ugly,” said Rob Schwartz, executive director of the advertising agency TBWA Chiat Day. “This year, there weren’t enough good ones and there were more ugly ones.”
A key example was Scott’s Miracle-Gro announcement, which, despite being one of the few places to allude to the pandemic, which said the gardens were “quite a year old,” was dazzling with a strange mix of celebrities from 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 garden party. I thought, “What am I looking at?” It was very confusing. “
In addition to last year’s plethora of painful headlines and taboos, this year’s advertisers were forced to face the persistent “hype” and pressure of having a place in the Super Bowl and the high price of $ 5.5 million for a 30-second ad. dit.
“The amount of money you pay only makes people conservative,” Schwartz said. “Everyone looks at what has been successful in the past: celebrities, puppies and babies.”
This may have been a problem for the Robinhood trading app, which was looking for a clearly conceived ad before the recent GameStop frenzy. Using pictures of normal 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.
The executive said the 30-second spot was a “real flop”: “Robinhood committed the biggest sin of the Super Bowl Spot. What they did was boring. If you’re bored, you’re done.”
By contrast, Reddit, also at the center of the recent commercial frenzy scandal, had a unique, disruptive five-second ad that displayed images as if it were a vehicle ad before posting a text:
“If you’re reading this, it means our bets have paid off,” the message read. “One thing we learned from our communities last week is that little ones can achieve almost anything when we gather around a common area.”
Another aspect was Fiverr’s spot featuring the Philadelphia-based Four Seasons Total Landscaping company where, in apparent bewilderment, Rudy Giuliani had hosted a press conference for Trump’s presidential campaign instead of Four Seasons Hotel. The ad featured the president of the landscaping company, Marie Siravo, driving a futuristic golf cart at the now-famous girl’s entrance to reveal a lush botanical dreamy landscape full of busy workers tending to butterflies and waterfalls.
In addition to polarizing, the Fiverr commercial was unclear about who Siravo was, what Fiverr does, and how his company adapts, said Bill Oberlander, co-founder and executive creative director of advertising agency Oberland.
“There’s a saying, ‘It’s a long way to go through a ham sandwich,'” Oberlander said. “If these are the hoops you have to make to point out a topic, it might not be worth a Super Bowl ad.”
M & M’s generally got the best ratings for its fun ad, with Dan Levy offering a bag of M & M’s as an excuse.
“I’m sorry for claiming,” one man said, as he offered a bag of mechanical muffins to a younger woman.
“That’s when a man,” he said before the woman interrupted his statement. “I know what it is,” he said.
GM’s announcement pushing Americans to buy more electric cars, which included Will Ferrell and his comedian comedians Kenan Thompson and Awkwafina, also garnered Oberlander’s best ratings for its ability to weave a message directed with purpose with humor.
Norway currently outperforms the United States in selling electric cars. “Well I won’t stand it,” Ferrell says as he hits a globe in the ad. “With GM’s new Ultium battery, we’re going to crush these teams. Crush them! Let’s go to America. “