The last victim of the pandemic? This year’s crop of Super Bowl ads.
Most Super Bowl LV commercials succumbed to the typical Super Sunday pitfalls, critics said – they were either overly safe and formal, or they were stuck in celebrities and bad ideas. Experts blamed manufacturing challenges and the tightrope walk advertisers had to walk, given the divided political climate and rising COVID death toll.
“Every year in Super Bowl ads, there’s the good, the bad, and the ugly,” said Rob Schwartz, CEO of ad agency TBWA Chiat Day. “This year there was not enough good and there was more ugly.”
A major exhibit was Scott’s Miracle-Gro ad which – despite being one of the few places to allude to the pandemic and say the backyards ‘had a decent year’ – got stuck in a strange mix of celebrities from Martha Stewart, NASCAR driver Kyle Busch and an almost unrecognizable John Travolta.
“That was a train wreck,” Schwartz said. “The Super Bowl is a celebrity arms race, but the problem is the random celebrity for the backyard garden party. I thought, “What am I looking at?” It was very confusing. “
On top of last year’s many grim and taboo headlines, this year advertisers were forced to grapple with the ongoing hype and pressure that comes with having a Super Bowl spot and hefty $ 5.5 price tag million for a 30 second ad, he said.
“The amount you pay alone makes people conservative,” Schwartz said. “Everyone looks at what has been successful in the past: celebrity, puppy and baby.”
That may have been an issue for the trading app Robinhood, which fiddled with an ad clearly conceived before the recent GameStop frenzy. Using stock images of average people doing normal things like petting a stranger’s dog, jogging, and FaceTiming with a friend, Robinhood tried to appeal to everyone.
“You don’t have to become an investor, you were born there yourself”, the narrator concludes the ad.
He called the 30-second spot a “real flop” and said, “Robinhood actually delivered the Super Bowl Spot’s biggest sin. What they made was boring. If you’re boring, you’re done.”
By contrast, also at the center of the recent trade frenzy scandal, Reddit had a uniquely disruptive five-second ad flashing images as if it were an auto commercial before any text was posted:
“If you are reading this, it means our bets are paying off,” the message read. “One thing we learned from our communities last week is that underdogs can accomplish just about anything when we gather in a common space.”
Another touch was Fiverr’s spot with the Four Seasons Total Landscaping company in Philadelphia, where Rudy Giuliani had seemingly held a press conference for Trump’s presidential campaign rather than at the Four Seasons Hotel. The ad featured the president of the landscape company, Marie Siravo, driving a futuristic golf cart into the now famous dingy garage entrance to reveal a lush botanical dream landscape full of busy workers leaning towards butterflies and waterfalls.
Fiverr’s commercial was not only polarizing, it lacked clarity about who Siravo was, what Fiverr does and how her company fits into it, said Bill Oberlander, co-founder and executive creative director of ad agency Oberland.
“There’s a saying, ‘It’s a long way to go for a ham sandwich,’” Oberlander said. “If those are the hoops you have to go through to get something straight, it might not be worth a Super Bowl ad.”
M & M’s generally got high marks for their funny ad, featuring Dan Levy, offering a bag of M & M’s as an apology.
“I’m sorry I did man-plaining,” said one man, offering a bag of M & Ms to a younger woman.
“That’s when a man,” he said before the woman interrupted to continue teasing him. “I know what it is,” she said.
GM’s ad prompting Americans to buy more electric cars, featuring Will Ferrell and fellow comedians Kenan Thompson and Awkwafina, also got high marks from Oberlander for its ability to weave a purposeful message with humor.
Norway is currently outpacing the US in electric vehicle sales. “Well, I won’t stand for it,” Ferrell says, slapping a globe into the ad. “We’re going to crush those lugers with GM’s new Ultium battery. Crush them! Let’s go to America. “