The Best Commercials Of Super Bowl XLIX

Yes, I know that Super Bowl XLIX is almost four months ago.  I got busy.  It's Memorial Weekend, and I don't have anything to do Monday, and that allows me to stay up and be at Caffetto on a late Sunday night (God, I love staying up late on Sunday nights) to finally get around to doing this.  So here are the five best commercials of Super Bowl XLIX.

I am very surprised that there wasn't an advertisement that floored me -- no "God Made A Farmer," and no Chrysler commercials featuring Clint Eastwood or Eminem or even cantankerous teabagger Bob Dylan.  (In fact I don't remember Chrysler running a spot for the Super Bowl.)  So all in all, this Super Bowl was very disappointing ad-wise.

So much so, in fact, that in my five best commercials I put the requisite Budweiser "cute animals" spot in my Top Five.  I will say that the commercial moved me more than their other similar ones.  But objectively it was weak enough that better efforts from the 60+ others that bought up to $4 million for 30 seconds of time in the game would have easily pushed Budweiser (which, for the third year in a row, won USA Today's Ad Meter -- you stay middle-of-the-road and predictable, America!) out of this list.  But there just weren't enough that were better.

Before I count down my five best (in ascending order), I should give an Honorable Mention to BMW's "Newfangled Idea," reuniting Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric.  In the end I couldn't bump any of the next five out of my top five.  Also, I cheated and looked at this ad before the Super Bowl (as well as a few others; more and more ads that will appear in the game are made available online before the game), even though I shouldn't have, and I feel kind of bad.  Finally, I could be wrong, but I watched the whole game (well, besides driving to my cousin's place during the Halftime Show) and I don't remember seeing the spot, therefore it's not really a Super Bowl ad.

But if I'm wrong and it did air during the game, I stand corrected.  At any rate, here it is:



The idea behind this commercial may be the most original of this Super Bowl (and it's getting increasingly more difficult to find an original idea for a Super Bowl ad that doesn't rely on animals, babies, slapstick humor or gross sexual entendres).  BMW managed to get footage of The Today Show in 1994, aka The Birth Of The Internet.  Gumbel and Couric were hosting The Today Show at the time, and this little vignette shows them figuring out what the heck is that series of letters with that "@" thing in the middle.  Of course, what they were trying to decipher on the screen is an e-mail address, technology that has been around so long that I think e-mail is passe.

Fast-forward 21 years.  Gumbel and Couric once again pull their perplexed, "What the heck is this doohickey?" schitck while in BMW's new all-electric i3.  Like the Internet in '94, they are confused by how the car they are in was created.  I can see how some may dismiss this as old farts not getting how new stuff works.  But showing two people who still remain members of the media two decades later (and, if I may say, still looking quite good for their ages) bickering about what the hell this thing is reflects a truth that many people may sense but don't quite understand: Our world has evolved at such light speed that the things we take for granted now were absolutely mind-blowing not too long ago.  BMW hopes that people not used to a car that was made in what Gumbel calls a "windbine" will buy it in enough numbers where it becomes ubiquitous in the not-too-distant future.  That is a genius idea and it doesn't get as much respect as it should.

OK -- now, my Top Five:

5) Nationwide, "Invisible"



I'm not exactly sure why an ad that stands out because of its stunt casting strikes me as so good.  I guess I like Nationwide's rather simple idea that they don't treat their members as invisible as Mindy Kaling had been and thought was being treated.  The stunt casting is something I like here too; I never gave Kaling's The Mindy Project a shot, but she is funny (at least here).  And for some reason it's cool to see Matt Damon be perturbed/real at Kaling bothering him, kind of like I assume he'll be whenever some fan comes up to him while he's doing something.

4) Carnival Corporation, "Come Back to the Sea"



This is the most gorgeous spot of Super Bowl XLIX ... and after seeing it just now, it may be the most gorgeous spot in recent history.  Carnival Corporation probably took out a loan to get aerial shots of their fleet of sheets slowly cutting through impossibly still waters, their lights beacons casting light onto parts of Earth many of its guests have never been through but plan on having a lot of fun seeing.  Points for using a speech from President John F. Kennedy during the 1962 America's Cup, when America was fending off a challenge for yachting's most prestigious competition from Australia; I think both crews were in attendance for a dinner where JFK made a very eloquent speech.

Using a scratchy recording is a similar and effective technique to "God Made A Farmer," where a speech by radio legend Paul Harvey was thrown under beautiful images of the farmers that feed the world (capped at the end, of course, by the Ram Trucks that these farmers drive).  It's an evocative, long-passed voice of a wise man that reminds us of the timeless qualities that we have forgotten to appreciate.  The capper to this spot was Carnival Corporation's entire fleet of cruise ships, cruising the ocean in the same direction at night, an armada of lido decks supplying the world with entertainment while trapped in really, really big boats.  Carnival runs nine lines of cruise companies, and every single liner in those lines appear to have been photoshopped into that shot, but it would be fun to think that they actually got every single one of their cruise ships in some bay out in the Pacific Ocean to shoot that for real.  I'm a sucker for that shot, therefore I'm a fan of this ad.  Then again, it may speak to me because my parents have become cruise fiends.

3) Budweiser, "Lost Dog"



Just to be clear: While I have never liked Budweiser commercials, I have never hated the animals in them.  I've hated their ads because they continually eat low-handing fruit, and people seem to eat these spots up, so it fuels my thinking that people are generally stupid.  But the Budweiser Clydesdales always look majestic, and the puppies are unfailingly cute.

In an extension of Budweiser's puppy love, a Clydesdale is shipped somewhere, but the puppy can't bear to see his equine friend go, so he chases after him.  (When the puppy is huddled in that box during that rainstorm, I think everybody wanted to take him home and adopt him.)  When the puppy is about to be eaten by a wolf apparently native to the state of Missouri, the Clydesdale and his posse sense his friend is in trouble and busts through their locked stable doors to save him from imminent danger.  That turn toward the (slightly) dark side makes this different from other Bud commercials which never even hint towards violence.  Mostly I like this one because the horses defend the puppy, which makes me think of the one time, the one friggin' time, my brother came to my defense from bullies.  Needless to say I wish my bro defended me more often.

2) Esurance, "Sorta Pharmacist"



I see only one spot Esurance (which, in case you don't know, is owned by Allstate) that uses this "Sorta" premise these days, and the "Sorta" person is not Lindsay Lohan nor Bryan Cranston, so I'm not sure how committed the company is to this ad campaign.  Too bad, because -- and I may be a star-effer after liking the Kaling Nationwide spot so much -- seeing Bryan Cranston reprise Walter White for comedic effect as a stand-in pharmacist is awesome to me.  I confess that I have not sat through a single episode of Breaking Bad, but I hear the series is uniformly fantastic, and I believe that White is never as funny as he is in this 30-second ad.  Kudos also, I guess, go out to Esurance for plugging another company, Pontiac, even though I'm not sure if they still make Aztecs.

1) Doritos, "Middle Seat"



I'll say this from the get-go: Partially I'm naming this #1 because the guy who made it attended my alma mater. But don't tell me this commercial wasn't funny. Everybody can relate to the point when the middle seat in an airplane next to you is filled by someone.  So this guy does all he can to keep that seat open (leafing through the book about Irritable Bowel Syndrome is a kick) so he (and don't forget the guy in the window seat!) can have a little more room.  But then he spies this real hot chick, and so he puts away the IBS book, the tissue he blows into, the dental floss and the nail clipper and flashes that smile that says, "Hey, you can slip into my middle seat!"  Unfortunately he forgot to wait for the guy in front of that chick to move ahead.  Otherwise he would've seen that the hot chick has her child attached in front of her.  And mothers with toddlers are the worst people to be seated next to, especially if they're in the middle seat.

One other thing to remind you: This comes from Doritos, which once again is utilizing its "Crash the Super Bowl" campaign where they have people upload spots they made (with Doritos branding, of course), and they pay the ad buy in the Super Bowl for the commercial that gets the most votes.  Once again, Doritos proves that you don't need to pay an ad agency millions of dollars to produce the best commercial of the Super Bowl.