Collegiate Times

The Super Bowl is the most-watched televised event every year in America. According to the Los Angeles Times, Super Bowl XLVII between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers averaged 108.4 million total viewers throughout the whole game. 

This massive viewer contingency makes the Super Bowl primetime for advertisements, as a third of the United States is watching. However, this year the commercials that fans look forward to all year were mediocre.

Companies go to great lengths for their “big game” commercials, a necessary measure when a 30-second Super Bowl ad spot costs around $4 million this year, according to the Huffington Post. 

Super Bowl viewers always expect the most creative advertisements to air during the game. Most of these ads will feature celebrities or already famous ad icons, like the E-Trade talking baby. 

This year’s batch of Super Bowl ads delivered on celebrity endorsements, but some were questionable — I am talking about supermodel Bar Refaeli’s GoDaddy.com commercial where she kissed a nerdy looking boy. The sound and length of this ad made it quite disgusting and was disliked by many Internet reviewers instantly.

The celebrity and beauty of Bar Rafaeli will attract many repeat viewers, which will make GoDaddy.com happy, but I feel they could have used Bar in a more tasteful way and still kept their customary, sexually-charged ad.   

One type of commercial that always draws large interest is the Super Bowl movie spots for upcoming films. This year, there were Super Bowl spots for “Oz The Great and Powerful,” “Fast and Furious 6,” “Iron Man 3,” “World War Z,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Star Trek Into Darkness,” and “Snitch.”  All of these films hope to copy the buzz “The Avengers” scored during last year’s Super Bowl, which led to the film debuting with the highest opening weekend in history.

These movie spots are hard to critique because they are simply parts of a movie trailer, but most of the other commercials didn’t stimulate or excite me. After the Doritos Fashionista Daddy ad and Taco Bell’s Viva Young ad, I was left feeling uncomfortable and bewildered. 

Dodge Ram's Farmer ad had promise in attempting to produce a deep and thought-provoking message, but it dragged on too long — reaching two minutes — finally revealing their product only at the end of the commercial.  About halfway through the ad, I thought it was promoting jeans because all the people in the commercial wore them.

However, there were a few brilliant commercials that deserve more recognition than they have been receiving.  My personal favorite was Budweiser’s Clydesdale “Brotherhood” commercial, which showed the growth of an emotional and poignant relationship between man and horse. Some other good commercials included Psy’s Pistachios ad, the Oreo whisper fight ad, Doritos’ Goat 4 Sale ad and Kia’s Space Babies ad.

Super Bowl XLVII had it all, from power outages to a Destiny’s Child reunion. However, with a few exceptions, the Super Bowl ads were disappointing.

For fans, this is possibly a good sign. Now, the companies will work even harder to make their ads better for next year’s big game.

A version of this article appeared in the Feb 6 issue of the Collegiate Times.