Best and worst of Super Bowl ads

NEW YORK -- During advertising's biggest night, Super Bowl Sunday, marketers battled it out to bolster their brands and promote new products.

BEST

HYUNDAI

The automaker released its ad early, but it still drew fans during the game. Boston-affiliated celebrities including actor Chris Evans, John Krasinski, Saturday Night Live alum Rachel Dratch and former Boston Red Sox player David Ortiz discussed a Hyundai feature that lets car owners park remotely with exaggerated accents that make "Smart Park" sound like "smaht pahk."

JEEP

Super Bowl Sunday was on Groundhog Day, so someone had to do it. Fiat Chrysler painstakingly recreated the 1993 movie "Groundhog Day," including the town square and other locales, with original actors Bill Murray, Brian Doyle Murray and Stephen Tobolowsky. The twist: instead of a Chevrolet truck, Murray uses a Jeep Gladiator truck. FCA Group marketing chief Olivier Francois said the ad worked to demonstrate the versatility of the Jeep truck since Murray does something different every day.

GOOGLE

Google's 90-second ad stood out by not using humor or celebrities. It features a man reminiscing about his wife, using the Google Assistant feature to pull up old photos of her and past vacations. The ad is set to an instrumental version of "Say Something" by Great Big World. "It's so hard to write earnestly and not make it cheesy," said Julia Neumann, executive creative director at ad agency TBWA(backslash)Chiat(backslash)Day in New York. "This was really, really well done."

WORST

AVOCADOS FROM MEXICO

Avocados from Mexico have carved out a niche with humorous ads featuring avocados, but they may have veered a little too far into "random" territory with this effort featuring a home shopping network with fake products such as a baby carrier-like device for avocados. "I thought the Avocados from Mexico spot felt like a random and gratuitous use of celebrity," said Steve Merino, chief creative officer of Aloysius, Butler & Clark in Wilmington, Delaware. "Not only did it not make sense to have Molly Ringwald as your spokesperson, it was also a bit of a distraction."

POP TARTS

Kellogg's went for quirky but ended up with a bland spot that isn't likely to be remembered. In a pseudo infomercial, Jonathan Van Ness of "Queer Eye" describes the new Pop Tarts pretzel snack. The idea is that Pop Tarts adds pizazz to pretzels, but the ad itself failed to have much spark.

SQUARESPACE

Winona Ryder went back to Winona, Minnesota -- which she is named after -- to create a website for the town. But nothing much happened in the ad, which shows Ryder in a snowdrift on her laptop being confronted by a "Fargo"-like cop. There's a more involved marketing campaign with Ryder, but the Super Bowl ad didn't communicate much.

HARD ROCK INTERNATIONAL

Hard Rock International went all in on its first Super Bowl ad, maybe too much so. It enlisted Michael Bay for a frenetic commercial showing a frenzied heist caper involving Jennifer Lopez, Alex Rodriguez, DJ Khaled, Pitbull, and Steven Van Zandt -- but some found it hard to follow.