By Lisa de Moraes
Tuesday, February 7, 2006
Inexplicably, almost 91 million viewers watched the nation's biggest advertisers vie for Commercial of the Year on Sunday, with breaks during which the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Seattle Seahawks pretended to play something loosely called football, and the Rolling Stones sang three songs, which the producer cleaned up for the kiddies.
It's the biggest Super Bowl audience in 10 years. Heck, it's the most-watched program of any kind on all of TV since 94.1 million people watched the Dallas Cowboys beat the Steelers at the Super Bowl in 1996.
It's also 5 percent more people than the approximately 86 million who watched the New England Patriots' exciting win over the Philadelphia Eagles last year, according to earlier stats from Nielsen Media Research.
I know, all this fuss over a game that was such a mess it made Sunday's Puppy Bowl, which aired at the same time on Animal Planet, look like an all-star game.
ABC wants you to know that the 21-10 Super Bowl XL snoozefest had a "reach" of more than 141 million viewers -- the second-biggest total ever for a Super Bowl.
"Reach" clocks people who watched as little as six minutes of the telecast.
In other words: the people who watched for the commercials.
Speaking of which, can we all just agree that Super Bowl ads aren't what they used to be?
Sure, we all loved Budweiser's adorable naked sheep streaker. And, based on yesterday's reax, it appears Pepsi has done much to reunite people in our horribly divided country by making all Americans realize that "brown and bubbly" is a very bad way to pitch a cola drink.
And who didn't feel smarter after figuring out that Eagle-Eyed Machete Enthusiasts Recognizing a Little Druid Networking Under the Stairs makes the acronym E-m-e-r-a-l-d- N-u-t-s? And, privately, if not publicly, you have to admit the CareerBuilder.com office chimps make you chuckle because they ring so true.
On a personal note, we have made calls to see if we can get a hamburger-patty gown like the one from Burger King's Busby Berkeleyesque musical ad to wear to the next White House Correspondents' Association dinner.
But, honestly, did any single ad make you sit up and take notice, as did the mother of all Super Bowl ads, Apple's unsettling, Ridley Scott-directed "1984," in which the blond athletic chick, hotly pursued by guys in riot gear, throws a sledgehammer at the Big Talking Head on the giant screen, freeing the Gray Brainwashed People?
Virtually everyone who rated the ads yesterday put Bud Light's hidden-fridge ad at the top of their list. You know, the one in which the 25-year-old guy installs a secret revolving wall to make his refrigerator disappear at the pull of a sconce so his Bud Light stock won't be depleted by unwelcome guests, only on the other side of the wall is an apartment of 18-year-old guys who take all the beer and then kneel down and worship the "magic fridge," teaching viewers that 25-year-old guys are much smarter than 18-year-old guys, or maybe the other way around.
USA Today loved it -- it topped its exclusive Super Bowl Ad Meter real-time, consumer-focus-group ranking.
Even Western Michigan University loved it. A panel of faculty and spouses from WMU's advertising and promotion program ranked the advertising on a 10-point scale based on creativity, strategy, execution and production values. (I know, sounds like a way to write off the cost of beer and pizza for a faculty Super Bowl party to me, too.)
Anyway, in a news release, the panel announced that the "Bud Light ad featuring a magic revolving wall and refrigerator took top honors as the best commercial of Super Bowl XL."
This year's biggest dud, most agreed, was the Bud ad that kicked off the game, in which a toady has hidden bottles of Bud Light around his office, causing havoc as his co-workers search for them.
"What a letdown--America waits all year for these ads, and this is how we kick things off?" asks Slate.com, pretty well summing up the consensus among the alarming number of folks who navel-gazed about the Super Bowl ads.
Yes, everybody thought the magic fridge ad was the best of this year's crop.
Everybody, that is, except Marco Iacoboni, associate professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA and director of the transcranial magnetic stimulation lab of UCLA's Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center.
Iacoboni and a bunch of pals used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the brains of "five healthy volunteers" who watched the Super Bowl ads.
They found that the ads with the Bud Light hidden in the office was one of the two best, while the magic fridge ad was one of the two biggest flops.
How can hordes of navel-gazers have gotten it so wrong?
"What is quite surprising," Iacoboni said in a news release, "is the strong disconnect that can be seen between what people say and what their brain activity seems to suggest."
In other words, people may have said they liked the magic fridge ad, but it apparently elicited very little response in emotional, reward-related and empathy-related areas of the brain. Or something like that.
Yesterday afternoon, ABC was dancing the happy dance upon learning that the episode of "Grey's Anatomy" that aired after "The Post-Super Bowl Blather Show" clocked more than 38 million viewers, by far the biggest audience for that show and the biggest audience for any entertainment program on TV since the very last episode of "Friends."
Helping "Grey's Anatomy," ABC made sure "The Post-Super Bowl Blather Show" wrapped up in time for "Grey's Anatomy" to kick in at 10:47.
The last time ABC aired the Super Bowl, in 2003, "TP-SBBS" lasted so long the Very Special Post-Super Bowl Episode of "Alias" didn't start until after 11, which technically threw it out of prime time and into late night. The result was that a Very Special Post-Super Bowl Episode of "Alias" wound up with only about 17 million viewers, making it the Worst Rated Very Special Post-Super Bowl Episode of Anything in Recent History.
ABC imposed a five-second delay on the entire telecast for the sake of the children of America. According to published reports, several ABC employees had their fingers on the bleep button in case someone lost an undergarment or said something that might turn America's children into juvenile delinquents, if not serial killers.
Someone like Mick Jagger, or Keith Richards, aka the Halftime Act.
But ABC suits did not have to put their digits to work, because the producer of the halftime show, Don Mischer, and the NFL had worked it out with the Rolling Stones that they would sing some of the racier lyrics in the three songs they performed, but Mischer would cut off Mick's mike during the offending bits.
So while the estimated 7 million kiddies ages 2 to 11 who watched the Super Bowl did get to see those slo-mo replays of that second-quarter "touchdown run" in which Ben Roethlisberger was tackled and the ball hit the ground short of the goal line, after which he is seen lifting the ball and putting it over the line, their little ears were protected from Jagger's play on roosters and male anatomy in the song "Rough Justice."
And while those nearly 7 million moppets got to enjoy the ad for Warner Bros.' new R-rated flick "V for Vendetta," which ran during the game, the mighty blade of Machete Enthusiast Mischer was there to save them from Jagger making his reference to a girl arousing a dead man in "Start Me Up."
And thank goodness for that.
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