My Super Bowl ad-review extravanganza is now up. It doesn’t take comments, so feel free to use this post to tell me how thoroughly full of it I am.
To be honest, I’m too exhausted and commercialed-out to sum this up into one big wrap-up synthesis (I was shocked when I looked at the finished product online–65 freaking ads? How do they manage to fit a football game into that?). I do agree with Ad Age’s Bob Garfield that this was an oddly violent bunch. But I think Stuart Elliott at the New York Times stretches a bit when he attributes the cartoon slapstickery to the cultural fallout of Iraq; unless we’re slapping people’s heads and poking eyes over there Three Stooges-style, I don’t get the connection.
That said, points to Elliott for connecting “a rock”–the pivotal object in the first Bud Light ad–to its rhyme-mate “Iraq.” So what does that make the beer bottle–freedom, or oil?