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Super Bowl Commercials: Advertisers' Biggest Stage

In an era of cord-cutting and ad-skipping, the Super Bowl is a sweet salve for the nation’s marketers. There is no bigger stage for advertisers — last year’s game drew more than 111 million viewers — and that is why brands like Airbnb and 84 Lumber ran spots that were viewed as responses to President Donald Trump’s remarks on immigration.

“It’s really a pretty lame year,” said Marianne Malina, president of the agency GSD&M in Austin, Texas. “When the TV promos for the Olympics and ‘The Voice’ and the NFL and Justin Timberlake overshadow a lot, that says everything.

“It’s an interesting insight into just the level of risk that people are comfortable with right now,” Malina added. “Last year, people had a very strong response, and now a year later, people are confused, everyone’s trying to get their head around all the things that are going on, so you can see how maybe the risk dial goes down. But in reality, the risk dial maybe needs to go up.”

Some standouts included an Amazon ad for its Alexa device that featured the company’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, among other boldface names, and a commercial for the NFL itself that had the New York Giants players Eli Manning and Odell Beckham Jr. re-enacting moves from the film “Dirty Dancing.”

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The wince award for the evening went to Ram after the carmaker used a speech given by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the voice-over for one of its ads, drawing a flurry of criticism online.

Susan Credle, the global chief creative officer at the agency FCB, said that humor was particularly appealing to Super Bowl advertisers this year given the social and political climate.

“Sometimes when the world is troubled or America is feeling a little — well, I wouldn’t say it was an up 2017 for everybody — I think there is a tendency to want to balance out the energy,” Credle said. “Lightheartedness and a little fun and joy is probably a good antidote to the reality that we’re sitting in.”

And while some were surprised that there were not any big ads focused on women and the #MeToo movement, there also were not any major commercials showing scantily clad women, like Carl’s Jr. did in 2015.

“One thing I haven’t seen are those ads that objectify women, which is refreshing,” said Margaret Johnson, chief creative officer of the agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners. “And guess what? There’s still funny stuff on the air. We’re making progress.”

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Use of King’s Speech Is Criticized

One of the night’s more serious ads — the Ram spot — drew criticism online.

The general sentiment: Did it really just use King’s words about the value of service to sell trucks?

“MLK wanted equal rights and for me to buy a Dodge Ram,” one Twitter user wrote.

“It’s the wrong mistake to make given everything that’s going on in the U.S. right now,” said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “There’s so much emotion right now around race in this country that this was a high-risk move, and clearly it’s not going over very well.

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“I think it was well intentioned, but they’re going to have a lot of explaining to do,” Calkins added.

Adding to the disconnect, the speech in question, delivered 50 years ago, touched on the danger of overspending on items like cars and discussed why people “are so often taken by advertisers.”

Ram approached King’s estate about using his voice in the commercial, said Eric D. Tidwell, the managing director of Intellectual Properties Management, the licensor of the estate.

“Once the final creative was presented for approval, it was reviewed to ensure it met our standard integrity clearances,” Tidwell said in a statement Sunday night. “We found that the overall message of the ad embodied Dr. King’s philosophy that true greatness is achieved by serving others.”

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles U.S. said in a statement: “We worked closely with the representatives of the Martin Luther King Jr. estate to receive the necessary approvals, and estate representatives were a very important part of the creative process every step of the way.”

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Off to a Slow Start

Wendy Clark, the chief executive of DDB North America and a former marketing executive at Coca-Cola, said she was underwhelmed by the ads in the game’s opening quarter. “At the end of the day, a Super Bowl ad is about epic, over-the-top production value,” and the first quarter “was a little quiet in the end.”

Still, Clark was a fan of the Doritos-Mountain Dew featuring the actors Peter Dinklage and Morgan Freeman lip-syncing to the hip-hop artists Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes.

“The complete flip to Morgan Freeman, it’s just so good,” she said. “There’s a surprise aspect there and it’s really enjoyable watching those two characters rap — the complete 180 is fantastic.”

She added, “Functionally, you’re also thinking, ‘Oh my God, I would eat those together.'”

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The PepsiCo brands cast Dinklage to represent fire, for a new spicy Doritos flavor, while Morgan plays ice for a new kind of Mountain Dew.

Greg Lyons, the chief marketing officer of PepsiCo’s North American beverage unit, said the casting was not a reference to Dinklage’s “Game of Thrones” character, who advises a queen who owns dragons.

Lyons said, “He was in ‘Elf’ — he was pretty fiery in that as well.”

Tide drew laughs heading into the second quarter with a meta commercial starring David Harbour (“Stranger Things”) that showed a slew of setups for other ads, before interrupting itself with, “No, it’s a Tide ad.”

That’s an ad. Not a movie.

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The Super Bowl regularly draws elaborate schemes from advertisers, and this year was no exception. Tourism Australia — the Australian government agency responsible for attracting international visitors to the country — decided last April that it would buy a Super Bowl spot as part of a broader campaign geared toward drawing more visitors from North America.

The form it took: a big movie campaign for “Dundee,” a sequel to the movie “Crocodile Dundee,” starring the actors Danny McBride and Chris Hemsworth.

The catch: “Dundee” isn’t actually being made, despite the trailers that have been released for the film, its movie website and IMDB page, and a cast introduction video that includes appearances from a host of famous Australians, including Hugh Jackman, Margot Robbie, Isla Fisher and Russell Crowe.

“We did a scan around things like the Grammys and the Academy Awards and other sporting events like the NBA Finals and the World Series, but the event that really stops this country is the Super Bowl,” said John O’Sullivan, the managing director of Tourism Australia. “It’s such a spectacle, right?”

The New York Times

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SAPNA MAHESHWARI © 2018 The New York Times

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