K-Fed Up With Super Bowl Ads?

Depending on where you watched the Super Bowl game (in Canada) you may or may not have been exposed to much of the hype and hoopla over the Super Bowl commercials. In Canada, you pretty much needed the HDTV-CBS broadcast feed to bypass the endless stream of Canadian Idol ads in exchange for watching recycled ad concepts and washed-up celebrities tote wares for deep-pocketed corporations. Just how deep were those pockets? We're talking $100,000 CDN per second! Perhaps the biggest ad was the one that was not shown. Rumors were circulating for days leading up to the big game that Apple had bought some Super Bowl tv spots, and many suspected a widescreen Beatles-branded iPod was going to be launched during the big game. However, this speculation proved to be false as Apple was a total no-show for the entire Super Bowl.

While the blogosphere's buzz over a possible new iPod launch proved to be unwarranted, the web world did catch a glimpse of one of its' best and brightest in a Super Bowl ad. Yes, that is Kevin Rose of Digg.com fame in that GoDaddy commercial. If you blinked during the ad spot, you probably missed him, but GoDaddy deserves credit for pandering to the web 2.0 crowd. Their marketing department may be full of hot babes and wet t-shirts, but they clearly know how to get Dugg. Does this add any fuel to the Digg / GoDaddy corporate marriage rumors? I won't go there.

I was at a venue to watch the game that had the US-feed and from my personal perspective, the ads did not even come close to living up to their hype. There was nothing iconic about the ads that were shown, and I must say it was among the weakest roster of Super Bowl ads I've ever seen. You can watch and rate all of the ads on YouTube, of course. If community rankings aren't quite good enough, a panel of marketing students at Northwestern University were surveyed and here were the final grades they gave the Super Bowl advertisers.

ADVERTISER 2007 GRADE

Sprint A
Blockbuster A
Snickers A
FedEx A
Bud A
Taco Bell B
Toyota B
Emerald Nuts B
CareerBuilder.com B
Coca-Cola B
KFC C
Doritos C
Snapple C
NFL C
GM C
Chevrolet C
E-trade C
T-Mobile C
Flomax C
Go Daddy C
Nationwide C
Revlon D
Frito - Lay D
Sierra Mist D
Shick D
Washington Mutual D
Prudential D
Van Heusen D
Motorola D
Honda D
Ing Direct D
HP D
King Pharmaceuticals F
Izod F
Cargill F
Salesgenie.com F
Garmin F

I will give Nationwide credit for having the cahones to put the cheap Casio beats of one Kevin Federline in one of their commercials. Using washed-up celebrities is a tried and true staple for the ad world, and in this case it worked well. Even though the payola must've been attractive to the alimony-starved K-Fed, kudos to him for having enough sense of humor to go for it especially given the high-degree of truthiness that resonates from the ad.

Kevin Federline Super Bowl Commercial on Video.ca

[CBS Chicago]

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K-Fed Up With Super Bowl Ads?

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