Yahoo Finance Hits and misses from the 2024 Super Bowl commercials
Sunday night, the Kansas City Chiefs delivered another Super Bowl championship. Ding dong! DoorDash here. Trophy’s on the porch. Don’t forget to tip your quarterback.
Like Popeye’s wings, BetMGM’s Tom Brady/Vince Vaughn act and the dear old Budweiser Clydesdales, DoorDash ponied up for its share of Super Bowl air time. It presented the idea that most everything marketed in adjacent Super Bowl ads was deliverable. Not Jesus, of course; He’s not for sale, even if the latest products of the ongoing “He gets us” campaign is pure sales. On the other hand: Hallow, the Christian prayer app, is very much for sale. Mark Wahlberg starred in the new 30-second, $7 million reminder to #StayPrayedUp for Lent.
A little while later, at halftime, Usher’s pretty terrific greatest-hits parade got people thinking about things other than Lent.
Nostalgia ran through the game spots even more predominantly than usual this year. See the stars of “Twins” reunite! Right this way for Aubrey Plaza and Nick Offerman, together again, years after “Parks and Recreation”! For Uber Eats, Jennifer Aniston fakes her way through a reunion with David Schwimmer, but (per the set-up) she doesn’t remember working with him, or the “Friends” they once were. “Suits” fans, meantime, were courted and catered to with reunited cast members (minus Meghan Markle) peddling e.l.f. Cosmetics’ $14 Halo Glow Liquid Filter complexion booster.
Some misses and some hits from Sunday’s Super Bowl of advertising:
Hit: Dunkin’ Donuts: Since you asked, no. Dunkin’ coffee is not my coffee. But Dunkin’ scored last year with Ben Affleck morning-shifting it at the Dunkin’ drive-thru, running into his wife Jennifer Lopez. Very funny. The sequel spot that premiered Sunday was a tick better, exceptional in its one-upsmanship, with Affleck showing up at Lopez’s recording studio with his own backup band in a pathetic rebranding effort. Bonus points to Matt Damon for deadpanning his interjections just so.
Miss: Temu: The Chinese e-commerce site has a vaguely sinister interest in stoking your future online shopping addiction, making viewers itchy with the prospect of ordering whatever they want, NOW, because look how cheap! It “feels like a dream, feels like magic!” You can “shop like a billionaire”! In the real world, though, Amazon’s competitor has sparked controversy over allegations of forced labor in its supply chain and spying on customers, according to CNBC.
Hit: “Javier in Frame”: A cleverly moving outlier in a commercial sea of snark, Google’s 60-second spot presents a legally blind man (played by Javier Kussrow) whose photos are made possible by the “guided frame” feature of the Google Pixel 8 phone.
Miss: Martin Scorsese directs the Squarespace alien invasion: Everyone’s looking at their cellphones on the streets of Manhattan, too absorbed to notice the UFOs hovering above. Squarespace to the rescue? Maybe? Website design never really enters the picture here, and while it may have been fun for Scorsese to make something like this, and the check probably cleared, the results don’t square with much of anything.
Miss: Bud Light Genie: Wishes are granted, Bud Light consumed, and a frantically edited scenario goes to waste. Pacing doesn’t mean only “fast.” Or slow. And since we’re on the topic of what activates a comic premise …
Miss: The shorter version of the State Farm Arnold Schwarzenegger “good neighbah” routine. The 30-second bare-bones edit of Schwarzenegger’s Agent State Farm, whose pronunciation of the word “neighbor” becomes stubbornly problematic to the folks making the commercial, messes up the central gag. Yes, it’s cheap dialect humor. And yes, I love that stuff, when it’s witty and not punching down. But treating this ad like its own highlights reel doesn’t do it any favors. On the other hand?
Hit: The longer version of the Arnold Schwarzenegger State Farm ad. Here, the Arnold joke works; the repetition of “neighbah” in different contexts and frustration levels has somewhere to go.
Hit: The Kia EV9 commercial, with a caveat. A young female skater excels in her latest competition, but unlike her proud father, her ailing grandfather is unable to attend. Driving up a winding mountain road toward home, her father has a plan: The girl’s grandfather watches from the living room window as a handy front yard ice pond becomes the scene of the girl’s encore. Tears flowed all across the land with this one Sunday. I only wish the set-up weren’t so slickly elaborate and millionaire-level expensive. Note: Last year’s Super Bowl ads featured six EV campaigns; this year it was down to two, following a slump in the EV market.
Hit: “Wicked,” the movie: It’ll be a hit, whatever its quality. The trailer that aired Sunday was quite effective. No sign, of course, that “Wicked” is a musical, based on a Broadway musical, riffing on the 1939 screen musical “The Wizard of Oz,” based on Frank Baum’s Oz stories. Studios really do not like admitting a musical is a musical until somebody starts singing.
