For this weeks blog assignment, we are to talk about super bowl commercials. I didn’t watch the super bowl, don’t have cable, and use ad blocks as much as possible. When I was looking up the commercials on YouTube, I was surprised by the quantity of commercials.
The commercials I watched included the Christopher Walken BMW, the Budweiser clydesdales, Google Pixels blindness accessibility feature, the Michael Cera one, and the Pickleball babies.
I’ll talk about two in more detail.
The Michael Cera one was for cerave lotion, and basically it’s him pretending to be really into skin care and generally just being overly ridiculous, and then it flips to a conference room of him pitching the idea to Cerave and then cuts to saying “developed with dermatologists, not Michael Cera.” I think it did a good job at presenting an unexpected bit of humor, though the celebrity pun is a little tired (most recent example I can think of is Michael Buble promoting Bubbly water). I also think think this commercial probably recognized how to market its particular product to this particular audience. I think the choice to stray from more traditional cosmetic industry marketing for the Superbowl audience was appropriate. Something I think they missed was that the value of what they were selling wasn’t very clear, and I’m not sure Michael Cera is the most reliable spokesperson for this brand. I also think that the joke isn’t very funny but I’m sure a lot of boomers thought it was funny.
The premise for the Budweiser commercial is that in a big storm where many services are lost a beer delivery is made the old school way with the team of Clydesdale horses. The commercial basically nails the nostalgic masculine western Americana vibe it’s going for with the western looking bar, town, guy, labradore retriever, beer, and horses. I think they did a good job summoning this emotion with the imagery and music, and providing this grand sense of heroism in a beer delivery. The presentation made Budweiser look like a super elevated heritage brand. Something I think they could of done better is maybe tone down the dog. The dog was a big part of the commercial but I think wasn’t super important. The relationship between the bar / community and the beer delivery guy felt more important. I think the other thing was it wasn’t super clear why the horses were necessary for the delivery. It seemed like just the power went out and there was a light dusting of snow.
Overall the commercials seemed alright, pretty similar to in the past. I’ll look forward to seeing them on repeat in random places for the next few weeks.