NEW YORK — It was an epic battle of the creatures Sunday night in the Super Bowl ads, including the cute, the menacing and the inexplicably rhythmic. A band of reptiles cutting the rug to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”? Hey, it’s the Super Bowl.
Much is riding on the ads, which are the most closely scrutinized of the whole year, as well as the most watched and the most expensive. This year’s 30-second spots on News Corp.’s Fox network broadcast were fetching as much as $2.7 million.
Last year, the game drew 93 million viewers, a level that many believe could be surpassed this year.
Using critters is hardly a new trick in the ads for the big game, but this year saw some novel and clever uses of animals.
FedEx Corp.’s ad took a decidedly Hitchcockian turn when a corporate underling entrusts shipping operations to a huge squadron of carrier pigeons — eerily reminiscent of “The Birds.”
When a tribe of giant pigeons winds up wreaking havoc by accidentally dropping huge boxes into traffic and picking up parked cars and hurling them through windows, a cool-headed supervisor decides that calling FedEx would be a good idea.
PepsiCo Inc.’s Sobe Life Water brand brought out some dancing lizards to bop along with Naomi Campbell to Michael Jackson’s 1980s classic “Thriller.”
Elsewhere, job-search site CareerBuilder.com was back in the game — not with the cast of monkeys it used for several years, but with a jarring yet effective ad featuring a bored female office worker whose heart literally jumps out of her chest, struts down to the boss’s office and jumps up on his desk with a little sign saying, “I quit.” The lesson: Follow your heart, literally.
Anheuser-Busch Inc. was once again the largest advertiser in the game, with a series of humorous spots for its Bud Light brand and a heartfelt “Rocky”-inspired story of a Clydesdale horse that doesn’t make the first cut for the carriage team, but succeeds after a year of training with an unlikely coach, a Dalmatian dog.
All of Anheuser-Busch’s other spots focused on its Bud Light brand and were heavy on sight gags, including guys sneaking beers into a wine-and-cheese party hidden in a loaf of French bread and a wheel of cheese, a group of cavemen who invent the wheel to bring their cooler of beer to a party, and a guy who gets fire-breathing power from drinking Bud Light, with some unfortunate side effects.
Several newcomers turned in impressive performances, including Planters nuts, a division of Kraft Foods Inc., which delivered a clever ad featuring a plain-looking woman sporting a full monobrow who still manages to drive men crazy with a secret scent — essence de cashew, applied by liberally rubbing cashews against the neck.
Perhaps the most visually stunning spot came from Coca-Cola Co. Borrowing imagery from the Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade, giant balloons in the shape of Stewie from “Family Guy,” the vintage cartoon character Underdog and even Charlie Brown duke it out over the same inflatable bottle of Coke, all playing out over the rooftops of Manhattan.
If you missed the ads, you can see videos at http://superbowl.devlib.org/ads/2008-superbowl.
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