Area panel weighs in on Super Bowl ads

Remember the Budweiser frogs? Or maybe you recall the Visa check card commercial with Yao Ming of the Houston Rockets and baseball great Yogi Berra. Both commercials aired during past Super Bowl games before an audience of millions.

As much as the Super Bowl is about football, it's also about selling products. With an estimated 100 million viewers, it's the commercials that everyone will be talking about for weeks to come.

So without the St. Louis Rams to watch in the Super Bowl, the Southeast Missourian asked a panel of three men and three women to rate the commercials instead of the game.

And their rankings followed somewhat the national expectations, which included favorites for Pepsi, Sierra Mist, FedEx and Cadillac. But the Budweiser commercials were by far the group's favorite.

The night was a sweep for Anheuser-Busch, said Bill Cole. He and his wife, Susan, liked the hilarity of the beer commercials during the first half of the game.

"We always enjoy watching the commercials and we like the humor," Bill Cole said. There were some keepers like the Jimi Hendrix Pepsi commercial and the McDonald's commercial, but the bombs were the AOL ads with the cast from Orange County Choppers, he said.

The Pizza Hut commercial with the Muppets and Jessica Simpson was a good one, Susan Cole said. And it even enticed her to think about trying the pizza.

Josh Haynes thought the best commercial of the game was one for H&R Block. The Willie Nelson talking doll was a clever idea, he said. The premise for the commercial was the Nelson doll would dole out tax advice if you pull on its string.

"When it started out I didn't know why Willie Nelson would be giving tax advice," Haynes said, but then he realized why. "I thought it was really funny that Willie Nelson could laugh at himself like that."

Nelson made headlines in the early 1990s because of a battle with the Internal Revenue Service over almost $17 million in unpaid taxes.

Ben Fleming, 15, didn't think there were any brilliant commercials among the mix this year. "It's been kind of dull," he said during the halftime show. "They weren't as good as last year when they had a lot funnier ones."

He did like the Pepsi "Thirsty Grizzlies" commercial though. It was one of 19 Pepsi ads that were to air during the game.

Fleming thinks there's too much hype about the commercials anyway. "You think there's going to be really great ones and then they're not all that good because nobody wants to fork over the big bucks."

The average price for a 30-second spot during the game is $2.3 million. Last year's price was $2.25 million for a 30-second commercial.

Budweiser usually produces some commercials that always get people talking. And that was true again this year.

Both male and female panelists liked the Budweiser commercials, whether it was the commercial with Fergus the dog or the Clydesdales and the donkey.

Budweiser can be really funny in its commercials because it's already a well-known brand name, said Meredith White. "Everybody knows the Clydesdales," which means the company doesn't "have to worry a ton about making sure people know their name or what they're advertising."

Linda Pittman wasn't too sure about the name brand, but she did like the commercial with the woman in a wedding dress and the guys watching football.

The commercial was for tortilla chips and featured a woman entering the room wearing a wedding dress as her fiance and his buddies watched a Super Bowl game.

Pittman was surprised by the extensive amount of commercials shown, and all of them seemed to be about food or eating. But that's partly because the Super Bowl has become an unofficial American holiday, with people consuming more tortilla and corn chips and spending more on snacks than at any other time of the year.

"We've managed to turn this into a truly viable American holiday" said Bob Thompson, a professor of culture and TV at Syracuse University. "But the centerpiece isn't the Christmas tree or the turkey, it's the TV set, and cuisine you can pick up at the convenience store."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

ljohnston@semissourian.com

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