After the jump: What advertising scholars, USA Today’s readers and at least three women thought of last night’s ads:
Now that the dilettante TV critics have weighed in, what did the people who actually know something about advertising think of the 2009 Super Bowl ads? The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University released its fifth annual report on the ads, and gave “A” grades to spots from Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, Doritos, eTrade and Denny’s. Its panel, however, had “significant strategic concerns” about the ads from SoBe, H&R Block, GoDaddy, Vizio and Toyota. About the SoBe 3-D ad, Kellogg makes the worthy point that, as eye-catching as it might have been, it didn’t do such a hot job—with the football players, lizards and characters from a movie that had just been advertised—of conveying what it was actually selling.
Meanwhile, I wrote about Doritos’ amateurs winning the USA Today Ad Meter Poll, but here is the rest of the top 5, as rated by USA Today’s readers on a 1 to 10 scale:
1. Frito-Lay Doritos – Crystal ball sees free Doritos – 8.46
2. Anheuser-Busch Budweiser – Clydesdale’s romance with circus horse – 8.42
3. Anheuser-Busch Budweiser – A Clydesdale can fetch – 8.26
4. Bridgestone – Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head take a drive – 7.83
5. Frito-Lay Doritos – Superpowers of Doritos’ crunch – 7.79
People love those Clydesdales. I can’t figure it, but they’ll be with us forever.
Finally, I and others have already ripped on the gross Go Daddy ad, in which three guys use their laptop to sexually control Danica Patrick and another woman. (The second Doritos ad above had a similar fantasy, with the protagonist blowing a woman’s dress off using “the power of crunch.”) But Go Daddy says that its own survey—taken of visitors to its website who viewed the ad—found that “two out of three women loved the Shower commercial.”
Which raises the questions: Was it exactly three women? And did two of them work for Go Daddy?