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Super Bowl ads battle for viewer attention
By The Associated Press
This article was published February 6, 2012 at 9:28 a.m.
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NEW YORK — The Super Bowl may have been a nail biter, but the ads were a snooze.
Actor Clint Eastwood waxed for two minutes about Detroit and Chrysler. An M&M candy stripped "naked" at a party. And stars from the 90s were everywhere, as were dogs and babies, of course.
Companies paid an average of $3.5 million for a 30-second spot for the right to duke it out Sunday in front of the expected 111 million-plus fans. Nearly half of the 70 Super Bowl advertisers put their spots out online in the days leading up to the game. That's a big difference from last year when only a few spots were released ahead of time. Most companies settled on cliché plots with kids, celebrities, sex and humor.
One Doritos spot shows a man being bribed by a dog with the chips to keep the animal's dirty secret about a cat's disappearance. In another spot, a grandmother uses a slingshot to hoist a baby up to grab a bag of Doritos that belongs to a boy in a tree house who had been taunting the baby with the chips.
Celebrities always draw attention and they were featured in many ads this year.
Chrysler, one of nine automakers advertising during the game, aired a Super Bowl ad starring Clint Eastwood, who talks about the rebirth of Chrysler and Detroit.
Honda's ad for its compact sports-utility vehicle CR-V shows actor Matthew Broderick living a grown-up version of his 1986 hit movie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." The ad includes two dozen references to the movie.
An Acura NSX ad features 1990s Jerry Seinfeld battling with Jay Leno over the sports car. The ad includes Seinfeld references like a cameo by the "Soup Nazi" character.
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Oldearkie says... February 6, 2012 at 11:27 a.m.
Without exception, the commercials were a load of trash.
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Jfish says... February 6, 2012 at 12:26 p.m.
With their millions, can Coke, Pepsi and Bud Light not come up with some funny commercials?
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timmyrose says... February 6, 2012 at 1:19 p.m.
i really liked the one with the shelter dog named 'wego' and the message to adopt from a shelter
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Jfish says... February 6, 2012 at 2:14 p.m.
Yeah timmy I agree, but it was 59 seconds of drink our crappy tasting beer and 1 second of adopt from a shelter
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jackalope says... February 6, 2012 at 5:34 p.m.
I can't fathom paying $100+/Month for cable or satellite programming (just to see 5 minute blocks of ads every 10 minutes), so I dropped all of it and use Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime access for all my TV programming. Why anyone would intentionally watch commercials is beyond me.
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