Super Bowl commercials 2011
For the first time in its 23-year history, it was a tie for first place in USA TODAY’s Super Bowl Ad Meter. A fourth quarter Bud Light ad featuring a dog sitter who puts dogs to work tied with a first quarter Doritos ad in which a dog gets his revenge for Doritos teasing. Volunteers gave both ads a score of 8,35 (on a scale of 0 to 10) Three of the five top ranked ads ads were already ‘winners’ of the Dorities and Pepsi MAX public ad competition, Crash the Super Bowl. PepsiCo’s Doritos and Pepsi MAX brands gave six of their fans the chance to showcase their talent on the world’s biggest advertising stage when they aired three consumer-created Doritos commercials and three consumer-created Pepsi MAX commercials during today’s Super Bowl XLV broadcast. This year marked the first time in the five year history of the Crash the Super Bowl consumer-created ad contest that a total of six ads received airtime during the big game, according to a company news release.
- Super Bowl 2011.
Super Bowl XLV ads didn’t blow anybody out Sunday night, but Faith Hill fans can confirm they pulled off a couple of slick reverses.
Hill’s Teleflora spot interrupted an America’s Sweetheart moment to toss a crude sexual one-liner into America’s lap.
Almost as surprisingly for long-time Super Bowl ad fans, Budweiser’s Clydesdales became almost an afterthought in their annual spot, a curiously silly ad whose punchline had a gunslinger breaking into ‘Tiny Dancer.’
We saw an animated Eminem in a Pepsi spot that talked about how before this he never did ads. Then a few minutes later we saw him do another one, for Chrysler.
Once he started, apparently he couldn’t stop.
Coke had a nice spot involving two border guards who figure out a way to share a Coke while still officially remaining mortal enemies.
Bridgestone tires figured out how to achieve similar detente between man and beaver. But the real dark horse surprise Sunday night came from the car companies.
Most Super Bowl car ads over the years have been like Super Bowl movie ads. Perfectly fine and perfectly dull.
This year, however, car companies decided they also might want to entertain us. Hey, with gas heading for four dollars a gallon, we’ll take what we can get.
All the 2011 Super Bowl commercials have now aired and, with so many released before the game February 6, there were few surprises.
The spots that stood out early on – ‘The Force’ and ‘Pug Attack’ – turned out to be some of the best, and the ones that generated so-so interest leading up to the game (Hyundai, anyone?) were just as lackluster when they aired.
That’s not to say there weren’t a few twists in the line-up of 2011 Super Bowl ads.
Probably the biggest surprise was one that no one, except apparently TMZ, saw coming. GoDaddy.com, known for its lusty Super Bowl commercials showcasing, or exploiting, depending on your perspective, attractive women like Danica Patrick revealed its newest spokes-hottie, Joan Rivers.
GoDaddy and Rivers both showed they could poke a little fun at themselves with that move, especially by putting Rivers’ plastic head on an equally plastic body.
Another surprise came from Bud Light. We’d been expecting to see the highly entertaining ‘Severance Package,’ but apparently we got that wrong – the commercial was an online-only release and not part of the actual Super Bowl commercial line-up.
That turned out to be too bad because the Super Bowl commercials that Bud Light did run during the game were pretty hit-and-miss…mostly miss. ‘Dog Sitter,’ in which a guy puts a pack of dogs to work hosting a party, was worth a few laughs. But two others, ‘Hack Job’ and ‘Product Placement’ seemed stale and more than a little cheesy.