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Ad Report Card: The Super Bowl Special

By Rob WalkerPosted Monday, Jan. 29, 2001, at 11:30 PM ET

It's possible that I would have enjoyed Super Bowl XXXV more if I'd been down the street at Liuzza's By the Track, our local watering hole. But no. I watched at home, and I kept on watching even after Greg Gumbel announced that the record for the most punts in a Super Bowl had just been broken, all so I could carefully scrutinize every one of the more than 50 commercials that aired during the game and share my conclusions in this, the Ad Report Card Super Bowl Special.

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There was a peculiar amount of hype about Super Bowl advertising this year as it became common to observe that the commercials now seem like a bigger cultural event than the game itself. Advertisers paid a reported $2 million a spot for their time. CBS aired a special on the best Super Bowl commercials of the past on Saturday night. The site Adcritic.com set up special sections on ads from last year and the year before. And the Wall Street Journal's Vanessa O'Connell wrote a piece about Adcritic's setup this year. (There are links below to those spots that are up on the site or elsewhere as of this writing.) Anyway, it's probably inevitable, given all this, that the evening was not exactly the cornucopia of commercial brilliance everyone seemed to be hoping for. Some highlights—or at least some noteworthy ads—follow.

E-slap of the Night: E*Trade, the online broker, ran several spots. In one (see it here with Quicktime or here with the Windows Media Player) that was slightly reminiscent of the end of Logan's Run, a chimpanzee wanders a ruined landscape, recognized as our own formerly dot-commed civilization, now abandoned and tattered. At one point the chimp holds up the remnants of the Pets.com puppet, and he sheds a tear like the Native American at the end of those save-the-environment ads from the 1970s. "Invest wisely," is the tag line selected by E*Trade, whose shares currently trade at about one-third of their 52-week high. I'll give the spot a B-plus on the theory you can't come down too hard on a crying chimp. But what's most interesting here is that in a burst of "I know you are but what am I?" chutzpah, the sport of dot-com mockery has now been co-opted by another dot com.

The Sociological Implications of Whassup: First let me say that this series is right on the verge of overstaying its welcome; this should be the end of it. Anyway, two new Whassup spots aired last night, one involving an alien bringing the phrase back to his fellows as the sum total of what he has learned among Earthlings. The other—click here or here—features a series of dopey WASPs in pastel sweaters re-enacting the familiar chain of phone greetings while drinking "an import" (clearly Heineken), checking on the stock market, and shouting "What are you doing?" in a prep-nerd style. The spot, which I'll give a B, ends with two of the original Whassupers, puzzled at this display of clueless inauthenticity. (The spots' tag is always "True," and obviously those cred-less Poindexters are the antithesis of legit.) Now, you don't have to be Ken Burns to consider this bit of cultural expression against the backdrop of race. The original Whassupers, who were black, were unstudied, creative, cool, and true. These Heineken drinkers have missed the whole point and have a comical lack of soul besides. They are to the original Whassupers as Pat Boone was to Chuck Berry, as Vanilla Ice was to Public Enemy. Discuss.

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise: Spot after spot turned on the surprise ending last night, and of course the cumulative effect was a sort of unsurprising sameness. Probably the most effective use of this tactic came in an ad—see it here, Quicktime only—that shows a couple of guys standing around a tree. Apparently they've lost something up there, and they throw various objects up into the branches to get their prize to fall. Finally it does: And it's a Volkswagen GTI. One guy mutters something about letting the clutch out more slowly next time, the implication being this car really flies, etc. Not bad. An A-minus. But for me, no surprise last night topped my discovery that Nash Bridges is still on the air.

Herding Squirrels: One of the most celebrated spots during Super Bowl XXXIV was an EDS commercial in which cowboys were shown herding cats. This year we have a play on the running of the bulls in Pamplona. (See it with Quicktime or Windows Media.) A local explains earnestly that "the one thing you can never do is show fear." Then someone releases … the squirrels. That's right, it's the running of the squirrels. It's funny, but the ad goes on rather longer than it needs to, vamping on this one joke for a full minute. The point is that you shouldn't worry too much about the big competitors because the really scary rivals are the nimble ones. And EDS—a tech consulting firm with more than 120,000 employees—can help you compete with the nimble. (The nimble competitor, incidentally, is almost as much a business cliché as herding cats.) This one may well be an ad fan favorite, but it didn't do much for me. C.

Bob Dole, Hard-Up Spokesman: Apparently all the snickering about his past shilling for Viagra didn't faze Dole: He reappeared last night—Quicktime version here, Windows Media version here —strolling the beach, talking about the "little blue friend" that's making him "feel like a kid again" these days. It's a can of Pepsi! Heh, heh. An angry candidate Dole once berated rap-promoting entertainment executives by asking, "Is this what you intended to accomplish with your careers?" Perhaps it's time some asked the senator that question. D.

Express This: Cingular, a wireless phone company, ran several spots on the theme of "self-expression." They got gradually more annoying as the night went on, climaxing with a gratingly exploitative commercial featuring an artist who describes himself as a "gimp." I have no doubt that this man is very accomplished, and I applaud his wherewithal and positive outlook on life. But equating his personal story with a wireless telephone company is plain old cyncism. F.

Curious Musical Selection of the Night: An ad for the NFL had as its soundtrack the Lou Reed classic "Perfect Day," which seemed to me a little more effective as the background for a heroin overdose in Trainspotting, but what the hell. Maybe a future NFL spot could be set to the irresistible chug-a-chug of "I'm Waiting for the Man," or even "Heroin": Footage of an end-zone spike could be synced up to match the appearance of that word in the line, "When I put a spike into my vein. ..." Or maybe not. C-plus.

What's Accenture Again? Well, it used to be Andersen Consulting, as discussed in a recent column. Last night the firm spent millions of dollars for four spots. (Here's one, via Quicktime or Windows Media.) In each we are presented with a sort of futurescape, presumably meant to blow your mind and finishing on some fanciful headline about "virtual surgery" or whatever. Tag line: "Now It Gets Interesting." I certainly hope it gets more interesting than this campaign. The only thing the spots left me wondering is whether Gumbel was counting them among the record-setting number of punts. Anyway, I'm giving them an F. And next year, I'm going to the bar to watch.

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Rob Walker writes the Ad Report Card for Slate.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments From The Fray:

[Notes from the Fray Editor: The Fray would have given Bob Dole and Pepsi a better grade than a D: as one reader said "Funny sells, sexual references sell, no matter how dysfunctional." After an elaborate post here on 'Whassup', Zeitguy asks "do you need a diagram?" Well really, yes Zeitguy we do.]

I found several of the ads highly amusing, but I can't think of a single company which sponsored an ad whose products I purchase. In fact, I avoid the products of big companies that spend millions of dollars on advertising, because they pass the cost of those ads along to consumers in the form of higher prices.

The most controversial ad was the one that featured the handicapped artist. Many people seemed to be offended because they felt this ad was exploitative. The writer of the article said "cynical". That seems like complaining that the water you just drank was too wet. All commercials are exploitative and cynical. Their purpose is to entice you to spend some of your hard-earned money to buy their products and enrich their shareholders. I found that I was deeply moved by this ad. It tells a story about the indomitability of the human spirit, and I am a sucker for that kind of sentiment. It won't make me buy a cell phone, but I do remember the name of the company, so maybe the advertisers achieved their goal.

I doubt that anyone in our consumerist society can truthfully claim to be completely unaffected by advertising. I consider myself to be relatively sophisticated and immune to such manipulation. But I can think of specific instances when I made purchases as a direct result of seeing ads. They sometimes make me aware of a product I didn't know about before.

--David Underwood

(To reply, click here.)

I don't think anyone gains by thinking too hard about the racial implications of Budweiser's "Whassup" campaign.

The original "Whassuppers" are authentic, cool, etc, whatever that means. They also sound drunk, and what they are drunk on is a beverage that must be chilled nearly to freezing to make it palatable.

The "What are you doing" guys in the Super Bowl ads are absolutely unhip, which I guess means they sound like white people trying to sound like they think black people sound, or should sound, or something. They also sound drunk, and though Heineken is not quite the dishwater Budweiser is, drinking it is still something one does if one lacks the time or money to shop for a beer with actual flavor.

Considered seriously, the Budweiser ads don't flatter either race. So don't consider them seriously. They were intended to get a laugh during what Budweiser certainly bet would be a very dull football game, and they got it.

--Joseph Britt

(To reply, click here.)

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