After a somewhat somber group of ads during last year’s Super Bowl, including a widely criticized spot from Nationwide about a dead little boy, this year’s commercials returned to the longtime staple of the big game: Humor. A visually jarring commercial for Mountain Dew Kickstart, featuring a creature the brand calls a “puppymonkeybaby”, also sparked lots of chatter on social media.
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In addition to sharing the list of the most popular videos (below), YouTube noted that viewers watched around 300K hours of Super Bowl ads during the game and around 4 million hours total. Can’t win them all – and apparently neither can the Carolina Panthers, who went 16-1 in the regular season and were the odds-on favorite to win the big game against the Denver Broncos. Here are the winners whose gamble paid off, and losers who dropped the ball. The game hasn’t started, but its ad has already ruffled feathers on Twitter. The ad has been viewed more than 18 million times on YouTube so far. “Wrong subject”, Kelly O’Keefe, a marketing professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said of the constipation ad.
What made Esurance’s Super Bowl ad campaign stand out was that it was one of the only companies to hold a contest this year. There are Super Bowl commercials from past years, as well. Commercials that connect with viewers can reap huge dividends for the companies behind them, while ads that fall flat, beyond being a financial failure, can also harm a brand’s reputation with consumers.
Capitalizing on election-year buzz, Bud Light enlisted Amy Schumer and Seth Rogan to canvass America to promote “The Bud Light Party”. A narrator paints a scenario where a “tidal wave of ownership floods the country with new homeowners, who now must own other things”. Still, there’s one thing that keeps even the most casual of football fans engaged for the better part of their Super Bowl Sunday: the commercials.
Turkish Airlines aired several ads welcoming visitors to the fictitious Gotham and Metropolis – these commercials starred Ben Affleck as the infamous Bruce Wayne and Jesse Eisenberg as the evil Lex Luther. “If you drive drunk, you-simply put-are a shortsighted, utterly useless, oxygen-wasting human form of pollution”. Budweiser has been famous for their dog and pony shows bringing tears to viewers’ eyes, but this year, it did not go so well. As Beer Business Daily has reported, though, Manning does own a stake in two Anheuser-Busch distributors.
The average cost of a commercial ad during the Super Bowl in 2013 was about $3.8 million.
NARAL, the promoters of abortion, complained, variously, about the “humanizing” of a near-term “fetus” in a Doritos ad; the NFL’s celebration of Super Bowl “babies”; and the dad who infringed on his teen daughter’s “autonomy” by “stalking” her on a date.
“Maybe they just missed the ad or just saw it and wanted to see it again”, he said.
Most promoted optimistic messages about money.
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Another amusing ad for a auto was with Kia, with a Walken closet. But there are still a few surprises left, with Taco Bell, Chrysler and Coke yet to release their ads.
