Super Bowl Commercials Give Amateurs a Stage

Contest Winners Are True to the Tradition of Goofy Game Ads

NEW YORK, Feb. 4 -- Along with the trademark Clydesdales, talking animals and high-end computer graphics, there was a new entry this year in the annual showdown of advertisers in the Super Bowl: amateurs.

Starting in the first quarter of Sunday night's 29-17 Colts win, a goofy spot for Doritos showed a hapless driver distracted by a pretty woman passing by; it marked the first time a purely amateur-created ad aired during a Super Bowl. Frito-Lay, the PepsiCo division that makes Doritos, had run an online competition to pick the winning spot.

Another contest, by General Motors, was won by 19-year-old Katie Crabb, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. Her winning idea was made into reality by Chevrolet's marketing division. Despite being thought up by a newcomer, that ad was true to the tradition of using oddball humor in Super Bowl ads, showing a number of men stripping off their shirts -- and some other articles of clothing -- at the sight of a new Chevy HHR rolling down the street.

Sight gags were back Sunday night, including one from Bud Light early in the game showing a rather unusual tactic for winning at rock-paper-scissors -- throwing an actual rock at the head of your opponent. The gag wasn't completely new, however, since last year Sprint Nextel featured a phone with a "crime deterrent" -- which turned out to be throwing the phone at someone's head.

FedEx combined a sight gag with another trademark of big-ticket Super Bowl spots, fancy computer graphics, with an otherworldly ad showing an office worker drifting off into space from the world's first office on the moon, only to be clobbered by a passing meteor.

A lot was riding on the ads, and not just because CBS charged as much as $2.6 million for a 30-second spot during the game. With an estimated 90 million people watching, the Super Bowl is the most widely viewed program all year on television, and the ads are subject to intense scrutiny.

Coca-Cola was back in the game after a long absence, taking on its rival Pepsi with a number of creative ads, including a homage to Black History Month with an understated ad showing the changing shapes of Coke bottles over time as milestones in black history appeared alongside. Other ads also mentioned Black History Month and highlighted the fact that, for the first time in Super Bowl history, the head coaches of both teams were black.

Some of the uses of humor didn't resonate well with experts. Stephen Greyser, a professor at Harvard Business School specializing in communications and the business of sports, said the rock-throwing spot by Anheuser-Busch was "attention-getting" but also "had a nasty character to it."

Bud Light, which often swings for the fences with wacky jabs at humor, scored better with Greyser with a different spot showing an auctioneer saying wedding vows at hyper-fast speed. Greyser said that spot had a much broader appeal.

The job-search company CareerBuilder ditched its longtime office-monkey pitchmen of years past in favor of a jungle combat scene among office workers, where office supplies become weapons. Think of "Dilbert" meets "Lord of the Flies."

Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University who runs a panel of students to rate the ads, called this year's batch a "mixed bag," saying advertisers were "being safe," with no one "pushing the edge of either creativity or taste."

An ad early in the game for Blockbuster, with computer animations of animals trying to push, click and drag an actual mouse, resonated well with members of his panel, who said it was creative and also delivered the company's message. The panel found a spot by King Pharmaceuticals showing a guy dressed up in a giant red heart costume "puzzling," while Garmin International's oddball spot with a showdown between a superhero-like character and a monster made from maps was deemed "hard to follow."