By: jackie.sauter

Sitting down to watch the Super Bowl last night, I expected to be more impressed by the ads than I would be the game. No offense to Arizona and the feel-good underdog story, but I was expecting Pittsburgh to readily handle a team that many said didn’t belong there.

After the Steelers jumped out to a 10-0 lead and a few fun commercials (in my opinion) by Pepsi, Bud Light and Coca Cola aired, I was reveling in the satisfaction that I was right. Then as the game went on, the show within-the-show got disappointing while the play on the field turned into a nail-biter finish.

The struggle NBC had selling Super Bowl ads (at a rate of $3 million per 30 seconds) started becoming evident with the high number of GE (NBC’s parent) commercials, NBC television show ads and Fast and Furious trailers (produced by NBC Universal).

The NFL also had a couple ads during the broadcast, which, as the rights owner of the game, I’m betting it did not have to pay full price for.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by the game while I thought many of the commercials were duds. Career Builder’s “if you don’t like your job” commercial was clever at first (who doesn’t like punching koalas?) but then got so repetitive I thought I’d rather listen to fingernails on a chalkboard than watch another second. GoDaddy.com’s “are you enhanced?” spot, a play on baseball’s steroid hearings, was like something out of a bad soap opera (and not in a funny way), and most auto ads were snoozers. (You can vote for your favorite ad here on YouTube.)

Some of my favorites included the Coke Zero ad (an homage to the Mean Joe Green one in 1980) and the Denny’s “thugs” spot (also a smart spend for its timeliness in promoting a giveaway this Tuesday).

What’s your take on the ads this year? What were your favorites and did they live up to the hype?

LIZ FARMER, Business Writer

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