Byte by Bite

Enjoy Super Bowl ads, again, on the Internet

by Marv Dealy

So I sat, pen and pad ready, for once not hitting the mute button on the remote when the ads appeared. As it turns out, the best ads were all done with and over in the first quarter, much like the, um, West coast team.

According to my notes, the winner was the Bud Lite ad that featured the wall that turned to reveal a refrigerator full of beer, followed closely by Bud Lite’s fixit guys sitting on their roof tops.

In third place I put FedEx’s cave man gets fired then squashed commercial, and tied for fourth I thought were Ameriquest’s commercial featuring medical personnel killing a fly with a defibrillator paddle, Bud Lite’s “employee incentive” ad, and Michelob’s “touch football” spot.

It turns out a lot of other people voted on their favorite ads, as well. A quick search at Google for “super bowl ads” returned about 38 million results. I started with SuperBowlAds.com where I found a link to SpotBowl.com where it is reported that we voted the FedEx ad first, with Bud Light’s Hidden Fridge, Grizzly Bear and Employee Incentive ads taking second, third and fifth, interrupted only by Bud’s Junior Clydesdale ad.

Any way you look at it, it would seem that Anheuser-Busch got the bang for the buck they were looking for. And there were a lot of bucks spent here; SpotBowl reports that the average cost of a 30-second spot was $2.5 million (same as last year) to ABC for showing the commercial and about the same amount to produce the dang thing.

With their purchase of 10 spots, that means that Anheuser-Busch spent somewhere around $50 million to push their products to the estimated 135 million TV viewers, about 60% of whom would talk about the ads the next day around the water cooler, according to Advertising Age.

At the other end of the scale, one might say, was the ad for the new five blade shaver from Gillette. The Fusion ad was ranked last by voters at SpotBowl, and after seeing it in “reruns” I can see why.

And speaking of reruns, if you didn’t care enough to record the Super Bore so that you could watch your favorite ads later (right!) then thanks to the wonders of the Internet you can relive those moments at www.ifilm.com where not just this year’s ads are available for re-watching, but so are ads from past years games, including the “banned GoDaddy.com ad.”

Replays are also available at many other web sites, including Google (video.google.com/superbowl.html) and AOL (sports.aol.com/nfl/superbowlads).