Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature based on the idea that song lyrics are a form of poetry. But I don't think Gioachino Rossini is getting that award anytime soon.
If you don't know the reference, the slogan that ends the ad is - at least I would assume! - taken from an old joke, namely:
Q: Where does the Lone Ranger take his trash? A: To the dump, to the dump, to the dump dump dump!
The key to this joke, however, is that the punchline is sung as onomatopoeia for the snippet of Rossini's William Tell Overture, famously used as the Lone Ranger's theme song. In print, it doesn't work so well. And spoken out loud, bereft of context, it sounds completely ridiculous!
Other than that, this ad is fine for a local (or local-style, since technically it runs in various markets) commercial. It certainly communicates what The Dump is and what they sell, and gives clear reasons why you might want to shop there. I had always assumed the name was no more than a gag along the lines of naming your college town bar The Library - "Oh, where'd I get this couch? Picked it up at The Dump! Haw haw haw!" But this commercial reveals that's not why! Or at least, not exclusively why. I'm sure they thought of it, but apparently it's not that cheesily simple. So overall, high marks for the actual messaging.
But man, there's low-budget and then there's NO-budget. Rossini died in 1868 - his works are definitely in the public domain. You couldn't even find someone to toot this out on a recorder so you wouldn't have to awkwardly recite it?
Once upon a time, ads for insurance companies were, well, normal.
If you search "State Farm Commercial 1990" on YouTube, you'll find a whole bunch of ads more or less just like that. You could obviously argue that this kind of ad is broadly out of date - and I don't just mean that woman's car or the hairstyles. The straightforward, aggressively earnest to-camera appeal is part of very few ads these days, more than three decades later. For comparison, here's one of the more recent State Farm ads:
This isn't the zaniest insurance ad going by a long shot, but it's broadly emblematic. State Farm had a long history of using actual employees in its commercials - even the original "Jake from State Farm," from 2011, was a real agent whose name was really Jake. According to a Variety article from a couple years ago, State Farm decided they needed more consistent branding and switched to a single actor who represents all of their agents, rather than having different agents in every commercial. And really, you need an actor if you're going to sell lines like "Jazz bath?"
State Farm was actually one of the last agencies to settle on a single spokescharacter. The GEICO gecko doesn't appear in every GEICO commercial, but he's been a staple of their advertising overall for nearly a quarter century. Allstate is still rolling Dean Winters out as "Mayhem" more than a dozen years after that campaign began in 2010. Flo has been leading the line for Progressive since 2008.
But speaking of Flo, that character helps illuminate the distinction between older ads and newer ads. The first Flo ads aired smack in the middle of our initial Ad Wizards run and we didn't write about them even once until 2011, well into the series (at which point they were starting to head for Crazy Town). After all, there's nothing to go after in an ad like this:
The setup to those ads (depicting Progressive's website as an actual store) was a totally fine concept, Flo herself was a normal and affable character, and they also did a good job focusing on what Progressive wanted to pitch as its distinguishing characteristic (we will show you other companies' rates too so you can compare!). But are those ads silly enough for prime time? Well, here's a 2022 ad also starring Flo:
Aside from the words "home and auto bundle" being spoken in sequence and the actors wearing the Progressive insurance outfits, there's nothing in that ad that is about insurance or has to be. It could be an ad for literally anything. I've never understood how these sorts of ads really make sense. Who is it for? If I don't have insurance, it barely tells me that Progressive is an insurance company unless I already knew that. If I do already have insurance, is it doing anything to get me to switch? Unlike the 2008 spot, it certainly does not tell me anything distinguishing about Progressive (I'm fairly certain virtually every insurance company will sell you bundled home and car insurance at this point), so I'd have to say no. Is it just aimed at existing Progressive customers, making them feel good because their insurance company has a silly little ad on TV? Seems weird, if so. Also, note that we've gone from Flo being normal to Flo playing the straight woman to goofy weirdos to Flo herself being a bit of a weirdo. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
As I find myself saying often, one has to assume that this sort of advertising campaign works. GEICO exploded on the scene around the year 2000 with a single, easy to remember tagline - "15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance" - and a whole bunch of wackiness. And eventually, pretty much everyone followed suit in one form or another. Why have Dennis Haysbert being earnest when you can have Dean Winters impersonating a 12-year-old TikTok addict? That's Allstate's stand now, and theirs are arguably the most focused ads of the bunch. The thinking clearly is, actually talking about insurance bores people to death. We need to distill everything down into a logline like we're trying to sell our screenplay to a producer in the elevator at Universal Pictures in 1973. And once that's out of the way, we just need to be funny. Consider Liberty Mutual:
Doug: [knocks on window] "Hey man! Nice pace. Clearly you're a safe driver. You could save hundreds for safe driving with Liberty Mutual."
Cool, got that message out of the way. Now we just need to show a guy going through a car wash while he yells the rest of our pitch! The audience will fall asleep if we don't have a zany visual gag! Probably need to repeat the "Only pay for what you need" part at the end too... can't expect anyone to follow it while they're too busy busting a gut at the image of a guy getting covered in car soap.
I've been saying this sort of thing for more than 15 years now so maybe I'm just the wrong one, but I have never understood the impulse to have the main character representing your brand in your commercial be a weirdo who is broadly recognized by everyone else in the commercial's universe as a weirdo. Look at the guy driving the car: he looks insanely weirded out and, by the way, he's right to. Liberty Mutual has other ads that don't feature this goofball and get the "only pay for what you need" message across at least as clearly, but I guess those don't get YouTube comments like "make a limo emu and Doug show" [sic]. And that guy's right. A show starring silly characters from an insurance ad? What could go wrong?
Maybe people really don't like talking about insurance. In the 21st century, national branding may well be more important to the up-and-coming generations of new insurance purchasers than local agent relationships. I still feel like insurance commercials could do a little more than say "We might do it cheaper!" and then go right into Wackyland. Or maybe it's just going to keep devolving.
TOP NEW INSURANCE AD CHARACTERS, 2023-2027
2023: Willy the Juggling Walrus for Esurance 2024: "Li'l Flo," the animated dancing baby 2025: LiMu Ostrich and Frank 2026: Jerry the State Farm Farting Goat 2027: The GEICO Gecko's Meth-Addicted Cousin Clarence
This ad isn't that bad, all told, although its key concept is pretty hoary at this point. But I do have a specific issue with it.
Jason Jones: "Are you excited about buying an electric vehicle, but worried that it could leave you... unsatisfied?"
This entire ad is basically a series of jokes about how an electric car running out of batteries is the same as a flaccid penis. Some of them, to be fair, are relatively funny. As I said, this isn't a remotely new concept - scanning the archives on the old blog yields a very similar "banned from the Super Bowl" Bud Light ad in which all the jokes are about farting rather than boners. Or this lame local Comcast ad that compares internet speeds to fucking. Or the Mini ad where trunk space is equated to anal sex. Or the truly terrible Axe ad that throws "balls" around with just the thinnest patina of double entendre.
So yeah. Ram isn't breaking any new ground here. Even the idea of "pretending to be a pharmaceutical ad" is hardly novel. Still, that's not the real problem.
Jones: "Then you could be one of many Americans concerned about... premature electrification."
The second-biggest problem with this ad is that its core concept does not totally make sense. I know what they actually mean, but the obvious play on words is to "premature ejaculation" and yet what's being discussed in the ad doesn't really line up with that; it's more of an erectile dysfunction thing. These are not entirely dissimilar problems, to be sure, but they are hardly identical.
Jones: "Symptoms may include fearing you might not be able to last as long as you'd like..." Guy #1: "There was plenty of charge before... and... sometimes it goes away." Woman #1: "A lot of times." Guy #1: "I've been working a lot."
This first exchange was the one I found the funniest, probably because it had the advantage of coming first. Uh, I mean appearing first in the ad.
Jones: "...being unsure if you have enough power to handle your payload..."
Load, everyone. Am I right?
Guy #2: "I don't know if I got the power for this, baby." Woman #2: "I'm adventurous, I like to go all the way. I don't want to have to question if we're even gonna make it." Guy #2: "...yeah." Woman #2: "It's a concern."
One thing that does tend to bug me about ads that use this trope as a runner is that there is usually a pretty big gap between the effectiveness of the double entendres. For example, "I like to go all the way" is not a very good double entendre in my opinion because that is not an expression that anyone uses unless they are talking about fucking. "I like to go all the way" to the campground? No. No one says that, ever.
Jones: "...lacking the confidence about getting, and being able to keep, a charge..." Woman #3: "Having to stop every time we got really excited, that wouldn't work for me. Stop, start, stop, start..."
Another thing about this ad... we are well into the electric car boom at this point. I really thought these concerns had largely if not entirely abated. Those Chevy Volt ads where people were confused about how hybrids worked are more than a decade old, and with (for better or worse) the rise of Tesla, it does not seem to me like the average American is still confused by or scared of electric vehicles. Granted, this one is specifically about electric trucks, and so it is trying to address a specific set of people with a specific set of concerns (can this electric truck REALLY handle a camper????). The idea of "premature electrification" is that you rushed into buying an electric car too fast and bought one that couldn't handle your particular outdoor adventure needs or whatever. But that leads me to the final problem here.
Jones: "If PE - premature electrification - is something you're worried about, go to RamREV.com and find out if the Ram 1500 REV, with options being designed to extend range in satisfying ways, is right for you." [onscreen text: "COMING LATE 2024"]
Late 2024!!!! This was a 2023 Super Bowl ad, remember. Your big pitch, in a time where electric cars are finally gaining substantial traction, is to be like "All electric vehicles are currently trash, but don't worry, Ram trucks will solve this problem in... I dunno, a year and a half? Almost two? Look, we're working on it, okay?"
Meanwhile, Jeep ran this eye-catching ad about hybrid vehicles you can buy right now:
Although this has its own problems that I suppose the Ram spot does go some way to addressing. For starters, if you read the fine print, the charging station shown at the end of the ad is a "concept charging station" (and either way you're probably not finding an effective charging station on top of a mountain anytime soon). In that same fine print, we get this information:
"Wrangler 4xe has an all-electric driving range of 21 miles and Grand Cherokee has an all-electric driving range of 25 miles. Based on EPA estimates with a fully charged battery. Actual mileage may vary."
These are hybrids, so the all-electric range isn't entirely the point, but at an introductory MSRP well over $50,000, it doesn't totally feel like you're getting the added value of a futuristic electric Jeep with a big 20 miles of range (and probably a lot less if you're off-roading). Hooray, my hybrid Jeep made it to the store and back on a single charge! Hmm, why the fuck am I driving a Jeep Wrangler when I live in the suburbs?
The electric truck market is a pretty complex one to navigate - and I mean all the way down to a psychological level. For one thing, there are barely any all-electric trucks yet (though Ram is not alone in promising a 2024-ish delivery of their product, so the market could explode in the near future). I'm sure many of the concerns teased in the Ram ad, like electric vehicles not being able to tow heavy payloads, are legitimately held by many truck owners who might consider going electric. And then of course there's the cultural piece - without trying to dig up stats, I'm sure that the market for pickup trucks is largely dominated by the kind of "real Americans" who like their meat red, their trucks loud, and their women quiet. The segment of this market made up of people offended that electric cars even exist - "rolling coal" has been a problem since the Obama era, and more recently you've had idiots engaging in "ICEing" EV charging stations - will probably never get on board with an all-electric pickup (or even a hybrid). You can pry their black exhaust plumes from their cold, dead hands.
For everyone else, this sort of ad makes some sense, I guess. But it retains a weird "too soon" vibe for me. The product doesn't actually exist yet and, with repeat delays in the Tesla Cybertruck (to be fair, Tesla is a uniquely terrible company in many ways) and other electric trucks being proposed and later canceled outright, it seems a bit risky to advertise for something that may or may not fully deliver on the (admittedly vague) promises being made in this ad. You'd think it would make more sense to run an ad like this once the product is getting ready to roll off the line, but I guess when it's a product that people will own for years, Ram is essentially trying to cockblock other electric automakers and save a retail spot for itself by promising that its electric truck will be the BEST. You know, once it's actually ready to go. Just... just hang on, it's almost... just give me a second. It's chilly in here, okay?
It's kind of bizarre that the Planters marketing team came up with the idea to kill Mr. Peanut before the idea that they could build an ad around the word "roasted" having a second definition.
Alternately, maybe they just dodged this idea for as long as they could, because it never had any real hope of being funny.
There's an episode of The Office where Michael organizes a roast of himself, thinking it's going to be extremely low-impact if not wholly flattering, and instead his employees take the opportunity to actually roast the shit out of him; the segment ends with Michael choking up and storming off. That's illustrative of the general problem with roasts, or perhaps more specifically with the modern "roast industry" that has emerged over the past couple decades: everyone wants the cachet of "getting roasted," but a roast only truly works when the subject has sufficiently thick skin and a sense of humor about themselves such that nothing is really off-limits. This is why by far the best roasts are those of comedians, who get it. By comparison, remember when Comedy Central decided to do a roast of Donald Trump and he vetoed any jokes about how he wasn't actually that rich? (He didn't have any problem with the jokes about him wanting to fuck his own daughter, which... anyway.) You can't roast someone with veto power over the content - and that's exactly what you get when the "person" being "roasted" is an animated spokescharacter for a billion-dollar corporate brand, in a commercial that brand paid for.
For that matter, how were you ever going to roast a fictional peanut? He doesn't have life history to make fun of, he doesn't really have a personality... in this teaser, the jokes we see are mostly about peanuts in general, plus two jokes about his appearance. Here's the entire, ahem, "set list":
"I'll make this quick, Mr. Peanut, I know you've got some brownies to ruin"
"Mr. Peanut, why are you dressed like it's five recessions ago?"
"Mr. Peanut, what do you eat at parties? People?"
"I'm a big fan, I love your work in Thai food"
"We can all agree: there's rich, and then there's 'haven't worn pants in 100 years' rich"
Don't forget, the roastee is allowed to get in on the act himself!
"Wow, that was brutal. Wish Planters would just kill me off again!"
Well, he's not wrong: that WAS brutal. We might disagree on the exact definition of that word though.
Woof. While his look may be the easiest target, the best roast of Mr. Peanut's design was already done by Cohen Edenfield on Twitter an entire decade ago:
is there anything more capitalist than a peanut with a top hat, cane, and monocle selling you other peanuts to eat
Not only is that funnier than either of the jokes about Mr. Peanut's look that we get here, but it actually gets under the skin a bit by making a capitalist critique, whereas the jokes here double (in frankly Trumpian fashion) as sly compliments about the subject's wealth. (Or anyway they would if Mr. Peanut were remotely a real person.)
Maybe there are some better jokes in the full roast, but there's no reason to believe that when this is what they ran with to whet our appetites. I'm not nearly enough of a masochist to sit through over ELEVEN MINUTES of this shit when the teaser is so dire. The single best joke here is Jeff Ross's about ruining brownies, and that's obviously pretty tame. (Side note: since when does Ross look like he got stopped halfway through morphing into Ving Rhames? If he didn't have the same voice as ever I wouldn't even have known it was him.) His other joke, the one about Thai food, isn't even a joke. (To be fair, it was clipped from a longer bit; to be less fair, I did watch enough of Ross's intro to the full roast to see what it was clipped from and it's not any funnier.) Ross is obviously more than capable of being funny at these things so I doubt any of this is really his fault other than accepting the gig at all, but then that's kind of my point; this entire concept was DOA no matter the caliber of comedian you involved.
I certainly don't subscribe to the older and/or right-wing comedian whining that "you can't say anything anymore!" Usually people who say that are griping that they'll get canceled if they keep doing their 1980s set featuring a ten-minute block about how much they hate Asian drivers or something similarly racist. But when it comes to a roast, you do need to be able to say virtually anything about your subject or there's just no point. And when there are corporate reins on your roast, that's never going to be possible.
All this wouldn't matter so much if the ad itself were a true one-off. "Roasting Mr. Peanut" is a passably amusing gag to build a single 30-second spot around, at least in theory, and in that scenario it wouldn't even really matter if the jokes were bad. But this wasn't just a punny gag. They were dead serious about doing this shit for real. In addition to shooting a full roast sequence lasting more than ten minutes and putting that online, they clipped multiple jokes (plus Mr. Peanut's animated laughter in response) and made those their own short videos on the Planters YouTube channel. They thought people were gonna find these jokes hilarious and want to share them with their friends. They thought they could go viral just by wanting it enough! It really is legitimately embarrassing.
Maybe Planters needs a marketing rethink. Between dramatically "killing off" their spokescharacter and now this, they seem to be trying rather desperately to find a gimmick that will attract online engagement. But I don't feel like it's been going very well, and besides, not every product should or needs to try for that. This is roasted nuts, not Mountain Dew or Taco Bell or whatever. Relax a little bit, will you?
(That's "Verizon = Bad Commercials Squared," by the way.)
Fun fact: Paul Giamatti has been nominated for an Oscar.
Cecily Strong: "What's up, Einstein?" Einstein: "My network has gone kaput!" Cecily: "Ah, you tried to save a buck on it?" Einstein: "I got what I paid for! Not so smart!"
Previous ads in this series have featured Cecily bantering with other moderately famous people like Julian Edelman, but for some reason this is the second one in which Paul Giamatti is required to don costume hair and play someone else (in the previous case, that someone else was a fictional character, Ebenezer Scrooge, although this version of Einstein is essentially a fictional character in its own right).
Cecily: "Nah, you're still a genius, but there is a smarter way to save."
The entire concept of this ad is frankly bizarre. You take a famous real person who was so smart that his name turned into a synonym for genius, then create a scenario in which he has a bad cell phone connection because he got some cheap carrier, then feel the need to go out of your way to make sure you're not insulting him by pointing out that he's still a genius. Why did this have to be Einstein? Couldn't you just have put any commercial actor in a sweater, make him a "college professor" type, and run essentially the exact same ad but without the weird backtracking?
Cecily: "Switch to Verizon! For a limited time, get Welcome Unlimited for just $25 a line." Einstein: "$25?" Cecily: "And it's guaranteed for three years!" Einstein: "Brilliant!" Cecily: "Well, you would know."
So... it had to be Einstein so that Verizon could go "Yeah, our deal is so good that even EINSTEIN thinks it's brilliant! Oh... but in order to set up the joke we had to make him dumb enough to buy some really shitball service first so that he could be switching to ours. Well, let's just put 'You're still a genius' in the dialogue, that should solve that problem."
Einstein: "I'm switching!" [runs off] Cecily: "I think the bike's probably faster..."
Well, is he smart or isn't he? I say this all the time but these ads must be seen by literally dozens of people before they make it to air. Nobody who looked at this clocked the weird, stilted nature of its setup or dialogue? No one thought it would be much cleaner to use some "generic smart guy" character? How much simpler is the ad if it runs more like this:
[tweedy professor type walking around a college campus holding up his cell phone] Cecily: "What's up, professor?" Professor: "Getting terrible service on my network!" Cecily: "Ah, you tried to save a buck on it?" Professor: "And I got what I paid for. Not so smart." Cecily: "There's a smarter way to save - switch to Verizon! Etc." Professor: "Brilliant! I'm switching today!" [runs off] Cecily: "I think the bike's probably faster..."
I'm not saying this would be some amazing ad, but doesn't that seem a lot more reasonable without the "we can't decide if this real genius is a genius or not" horseshit? And I feel like the message comes across clearer when Cecily isn't opposite a famous actor hamming it up in a barely-trying German accent and fright wig. But then Verizon wouldn't get to smugly pretend that their deals are endorsed by a brilliant physicist who's been dead for almost 70 years. Can't wait for their "5G or not 5G" ad with "William Shakespeare" (Paul Giamatti crammed into a doublet).
So here's my question: why does this store even carry Michelob Ultra?
Stocking a rival product at your TV commercial store that only sells one product just so you can shit on said product when a customer wanders in and naively tries to buy it seems like a long way to go. You had to purchase that beer from the distributor, man! You are losing money by never selling it! You don't see the "Disaronno Only" bar doing shit like this.
Miller has been running ads for quite some time now on the premise "we have more taste than Bud Light and Michelob Ultra" - this ad is from nearly 20 years ago (and for good measure features an early use of eventual annoying Twitter meme "Let that sink in"). Recently it got to the point that Anheuser-Busch actually filed a complaint with the National Advertising Division. Miller apparently had enough to back up their claim, however, and A-B's complaint was broadly dismissed. If you look at the fine print of this ad, the source for the claim is apparently a 2018 taste test done by the "Institute for Perception," and yes, that is a real thing.
If it seems weird that Miller Lite is going after Michelob Ultra, which it already outsells, apparently they've become concerned that Michelob Ultra has a "health halo," per Miller VP Anup Shah, which is leading to an increase in market share among calorie-conscious drinkers who haven't already switched to one of those hard seltzers or whatever. As it is, that article indicates that light beer is losing sales volume - I have to assume at least some of that slack is being taken up by the White Claw corner of the market. Miller may brag about having "more taste" than Michelob Ultra, but a lot of people seem willing to consume a handful more calories (most major hard seltzers have about 100 per 12 ounces) in order to avoid drinking something that tastes like shitty beer. I don't have much use for hard seltzer myself but it's clearly having a moment. You wouldn't think there'd be that much overlap between the Miller Lite crowd and the White Claw crowd but I do wonder how long it will be before we see one of these big light beer brands train their sights on the new competition. Anheuser-Busch has already settled on "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," but what about Miller?
Oh. They already did that two years ago, you say?
In theory I can get on board with this. The hard seltzer thing absolutely felt like a fad when it first exploded and there were suddenly 500 different brands at every store. Everyone even remotely adjacent to the category seemed to jump in - light beer brand? Hard seltzer. Vodka brand? Hard seltzer (or at least something similar enough). Sparkling water brand? Hard seltzer. If it really was a dumb bandwagon, dismissing calls to jump on it could make you into the same kind of farsighted genius who avoided the "Metaverse" or the whole NFT thing. (Oops.)
In reality, however, the hard seltzer bubble (see what I did there?) has yet to burst, and in fact Miller's parent company MolsonCoors makes multiple hard seltzers including the aforementioned Topo Chico. The fact that they've yet to decide to slap the Miller name on one in a time when beer sales are falling is laudable in a way, but may be a commercial error. Time will tell on that one, I guess, but with more alcoholic options than ever, what kind of person is really reaching for a Miller Lite these days? I guess it remains one of the lower-calorie options if you just want to get a cheap buzz going, but it does seem like the average drinker might not be satisfied with that alone. Ultimately I think Miller Lite is probably going to have to start making some ads that do a little more repositioning than just "tastes better than Michelob Ultra." Budweiser has seen the writing on the wall and is trying to make their appeal more cultural - maybe Miller Lite isn't a brand that has that option, but it just seems like they need to try something else.
When it comes to classic comedies, 1995's Clueless doesn't have the reputation as a laugh riot that something like Caddyshack does. But it is still a comedy. Which means it's still ripe for an ad to ruin.
Cher: "I used to be pretty clueless about shopping."
This might seem cringe-inducing until you remember that the movie itself drops the word "clueless" in the dialogue at least three or four times. So it actually tracks.
Amber: "Among other things." Cher: "Like when I heard I could save by getting cash back with Rakuten, I was like 'As if!' But then I was like, 'Ugh, why didn't I do this sooner?'"
I recently rewatched this movie and one of the key things you notice when you watch it is that its protagonist is actually pretty annoying. And if you think these lines are annoying coming out of a cute teenager, imagine how annoying they are coming out of a 46-year-old anti-vaxxer.
Cher: "You can get cash back on all the fashion, even your most capable outfits..."
I know "most capable outfit" is a specific reference to the movie because I've seen it in the last month, but that's a fairly deep cut IMO. This movie is nearly 28 years old. What percentage of people are going to get that? Okay I don't care anymore.
Cher: "...at your fave beauty stores - ooh, eye cream! Not that I need it."
"Not that I need it, because I got plastic surgery instead." (I have no idea if Alicia Silverstone actually got plastic surgery. Either way, she looks fine for 46, but 46 isn't even that old and also she definitely looks like she's in her mid-40s. Settle down. Do you think half the pitch for this ad was "We'll let you talk about how young you definitely still look?")
Cher: "And on pretty much whatever! Who put that there? In conclusion, you'd have to be butt-crazy to shop without Rakuten." [class applauds] Cher: "Cha-ching!"
"Butt-crazy" is of course a reference to the least weird part of Clueless, when Cher decides she wants to lose her virginity to her stepbrother. (Ironically this is probably the part of the movie that has aged the best, at least in terms of this country's porn preferences. Or so I hear.) It also seems notable that Paul Rudd also appeared in a Super Bowl ad in his capacity as a major Marvel superhero while Silverstone was relegated to playing the nearly three-decade-old hits.
Amber: "Um, hello, do I even get a rebuttal?" Cher: "I'm sure it'd be... re-brutal." Amber: "Whatever."
And that is the joke you get when ad writers can't just pull directly from the movie. (I don't remember that line in the movie anyway. If it was, probably the reason I forgot is because it is not funny and sucks.)
[Cher sits down] Guy behind her: "Aren't you a little old for high school?" Cher: "What?" *winks at camera*
Oh sorry, we had an even better joke to go out on! "What?" Classic comedy gold right there.
Nostalgia is always serious business - remember the period from about 1990 to 1996 when suddenly half the sitcoms from the 1950s and 1960s got modern updates? I suppose I should be glad that stuff like this is relegated to easily forgotten TV commercials and we're not getting, like, a $100 million Seinfeld movie starring Miles Teller as Jerry. But as someone for whom mid-90s references should be right in the sweet spot, I just find them tiresome. Hearing adult woman Alicia Silverstone rehash a bunch of old bits from her brief period as an it-girl isn't inherently funny and this ad is far too stiff to make them work beyond just "oh yeah, that was a line in that movie" recognition bingo. For the money Rakuten presumably spent hiring Silverstone and recreating her iconic wardrobe, they could potentially have written a real commercial that gets the message across even stronger. I'm sure the marketers have all kinds of data saying that "seeing a thing you've seen before" is a huge sales driver or it wouldn't be such a common tactic, but at the very least it would help if "thing I've seen before" was even a tiny bit funny or enjoyable to watch.
There really is no movie so funny that a beer ad trying to capitalize on its recognizability can't completely drain it of anything resembling humor.
I say this sort of thing a lot when it comes to ads, but here I go again: I defy you to explain to me how any of this is funny. It is supposed to be funny, surely. You don't ape the aesthetic and directly pull lines from a classic comedy because you are not trying to be funny. But realistically, you probably do it because you don't know how to be funny without just referencing something funny and hoping that's enough. And it very much is not. Maybe some of these lines play funnier in the longer, online-only version of this ad with a little more context. But you knew you were making this to be cut down into 60 seconds. (In any event, I'm hard-pressed to understand what the "jokes" are here other than expecting me to laugh at the repetition of a line I've heard before - with that in mind, these were the best lines they could pull?)
Brian Cox in the Ted Knight part is fairly inspired casting, but otherwise I don't really know why anyone in this ad is in it other than "they were available." This is Serena Williams' second alcohol-promoting appearance of the 2023 Super Bowl and I guess all the talking in the Remy Martin ad gave her laryngitis because she inexplicably has zero lines in this one despite being the ostensible main character. Either way I don't know why it's her as opposed to literally anyone else. Why is Tony Romo playing Carl? I guess all the athletes here are also big golfers. Sure, why not. (Michael O'Keefe, Danny Noonan from the original movie, also makes a cameo as the "Be the ball" guy and if you knew that before reading it in a YouTube comment that puts you one ahead of me. To be fair to me, Michael O'Keefe is 67 years old.)
For good measure, the ad closes with the slogan "It's only worth it if you enjoy it" which is so vapid and devoid of meaning it could be appended to almost any commercial. What exactly is "it?" Golf? Michelob Ultra? Life? Deep stuff, man.
If you're curious, here is the full three-minute version which, I must say, adds virtually nothing except for: (a) a second shot of Michael O'Keefe in which he is much easier to recognize, (b) a couple pointless shots of the gopher that I'm amazed did not make it into the TV version, and (c) an unconnected coda with Tony Romo doing the Bill Murray "it's a Cinderella story" bit. I don't know who told Tony Romo that his Carl Spackler impression is hysterically funny but they need to be shot. (Also, astoundingly, Serena Williams still does not get even a single word of dialogue in the full version. And no, none of the lines are funnier with small bits of additional context. If anything it feels like they were being needlessly padded out to get to three minutes! Which doesn't even make sense!)
I have a confession to make: I didn't actually watch that much of this year's Super Bowl. I basically watched the second quarter, the halftime show, and then the last ten minutes or so. There are a variety of reasons for this which I won't bore you with, but the upshot is that I didn't see that many ads live, and in the moment I remember thinking, "Huh, the ads aren't that bad this year." So I wasn't going to bother to make a post at all, but then I thought, "Eh, maybe I should go back and see what else ran, and record my thoughts, because nothing says prime content time like a post on Super Bowl ads a week-plus after the game on a blog that now apparently makes one post a year."
Whatever. Here we go. (In any event, if I accidentally reference an ad that didn't air or didn't initially air during the game, it's because I had to rely on someone else's list of what was a Super Bowl ad.)
The Apple 1984 Memorial Award for Least Shitty Ad
I feel like this isn't normally the kind of ad I'd pick here, but this one just worked for me:
To be frank, I barely know who Jack Harlow is. But you have to give it to this ad: it has some good visual gags, a few decent jokes, Harlow sells his lines fairly well for a non-actor, the punchline plays, and the ad manages to make it clear what it's actually for right up front and again at the end. It's not brilliant or anything, but when it comes to Super Bowl ads the bar is fairly low.
Runners-Up: I'm sure a lot of people would have picked one of the two sappy dog ads here (only one of which was for actual dog food), but they were a bit much for me. The Amazon one doesn't make that much sense as an ad for Amazon (though I recognize they're beyond needing to do that, as a brand) and as for the Farmer's Dog, the less said about "I apparently love my dog more than my baby" the better.
The Actual 1984 Award for Most Dystopian Ad
There are only a handful of companies who could possibly win an award like this, which I felt moved to create specially for Google:
There are a lot of problems with this ad, starting with the fact that all the photos that need to be "fixed" pretty transparently look like they had the "problems" edited into them in the first place. I'm additionally wary of what kind of AI control over your photos would be required to effectively "unblur" them. But also... remember how in Soviet Russia, the Communist Party would edit photos to remove former key party members who later ran afoul of Stalin or other top brass and had to be disappeared? That's now a thing that a tech company is touting as a key feature of its cell phones. Cute? (And why did this ad need to be 90 seconds long? Did you think I wouldn't get the "erase your ex" joke unless Amy Schumer was there to explain it to me?)
Most Overproduced Ad
As ever, there are about 500 contenders for this one, but I settled on Kia.
That's a lot of driving and helicopter shots - many of which are shot at a pretty good distance from the car, which seems to kind of defeat the purpose of a car ad - all to end up at the single most predictable punchline that maybe any ad had this year (and there were quite a few).
Runner-Up: The production on this Workday ad isn't super high (it's not like that's an actual crowd behind Paul Stanley) but it's still a lot of arenas and mansions all for a single joke that, not for nothing, puts all of its eggs into the basket of "shitting on the people who use your product." I can barely tell what Workday is from watching it, and it refers to people who are already using Workday, so the implication is they spent "60 second Super Bowl ad money" on making fun of their own user base. Sure!
Cheapest Budget/Clumsiest Execution Award
And for the exact opposite of too much production, there's TurboTax:
Credit for paying the royalties for a song people would recognize, I guess.
Runner-Up: The Oikos ad featuring Deion Sanders and various members of his family, only some of whom appear to be Sanders in old-man makeup, is just kind of baffling. Am I supposed to know or care who these people are? And what did this have to do with yogurt?
Worst Use of "Humor" Award
In a true irony, one of the few celebrity ads to center itself on an honest-to-God comedian somehow turned out to be the least funny!
When the first Austin Powers movie did this joke - TWENTY-SIX MOTHERFUCKING YEARS AGO - it was funny. And to be clear, it was funny primarily because it was a parade of dick jokes. This takes the joke structure and changes the dick jokes to... the names of some famous people. It really is the apotheosis of Super Bowl advertising to put out a commercial where every "punchline" is literally just yelling the name of a celebrity appearing in the ad. It's also about as funny as the stomach cramps David Ortiz is going to get from that Kevin Hart cheese head. (Also, fuck sports betting apps.)
Runner-Up: There's a million, of course, but the "not that kind of shelter, Sarah" joke in the Busch ad is truly dire. Commercials asking you to remember other commercials are also just annoying. I couldn't give this an award though because I do like Sarah McLachlan's scared acting at the end.
Flimsiest Pretense Award
Avocados from Mexico rewound even further this year. All the way to the Garden of Eden. And hey, remember what the people in the Garden of Eden were?
This is the long version of the ad, so I'm guessing it might be a little more risque than the one that actually aired, but with this premise I'm sure there was plenty of skin on the airwaves on Super Bowl Sunday. We have to give them some credit: there's way more "buff male model" semi-nudity in this one than "sexy hot babe" semi-nudity, so at least that's equal opportunity ogling compared to many years in the past. But then you have to go out on a "looking right up at the Statue of Liberty's you-know-what" joke, so all points are forfeited.
Runner-Up: As I noted last year, the "sexy babes sell you a thing" ads are kind of a thing of the past, and just as well. So there's really no other ad that jumps out here.
The Rick Dalton Award for the Most Egregious Use of B-List Celebrities
There were several ads, including the DraftKings one already mentioned, that were really just a parade of cameos. But you gotta go with Uber One here:
When you go out of your way to build your ad around several 90s one-hit wonders, that is PRETTY egregious. But the "What Does the Fox Say" guys, a decade later? That puts this over the top.
Runner-Up: Downy building an entire ad around Danny McBride of all people, and then not even really trying to make it funny, is right up there.
Ironically, this year I felt like I needed to add a separate category for this one:
The Jack Nicholson Award for the Most Egregious Use of A-List Celebrities
Shockingly, this might have been a tougher award to hand out than the Dalton. Brie Larson and Jon Hamm talking about how their names sound like food? Ben Affleck getting scolded by Jennifer Lopez in the Dunkin drive-thru? Ordinarily J-Lo shilling for DD would do it for me, but since Affleck's affinity for Dunkin' Donuts is well-known and legitimate, I think we have to give it to T-Mobile:
Not only is there absolutely no reason for John Travolta to appear in this or any ad, but it's especially creepy because he could not look less like John Travolta these days. You really had to have him do a song from Grease just so it would be clear who this new neighbor even was.
Runner-Up: I actually don't think it's that terrible of an ad, but building an entire minute-long spot around Miles Teller dancing takes chutzpah.
The Bad Idea Jeans Award for Most Epic Miscalculation
E-Trade. Not because they did something scandalous like past winners of this award... but... well, maybe they did.
I'm trying to think of anything I wanted less than the return of the E-Trade baby. And it was definitely another ad that put babies in conspicuously adult situations so they'd end up making comments implying babies trying to get laid. The "you must be 18 to use E-Trade" fine print at the end is kind of the icing on this particular cake, although the fact that you can barely tell what E-Trade is from this ad, meaning they're relying almost entirely on "public goodwill for the E-Trade baby" as a product pitch, is also incredibly troubling.
SkyMall Championship Trophy for Weirdest Attempt to Sell a Product
I can envision how this ad was created.
"Okay it's time to come up with Remy Martin's Super Bowl ad. What have you got?"
"Okay uh..." *spins wheel* "...Serena Williams."
"...uh huh?"
"Ummm..." *throws dart* "...gives Al Pacino's Any Given Sunday speech?"
At least there's a connection to football, I guess?
Runner-Up: I already went at these Pringles ads last year, but this year's manages to be even worse somehow.
Worst Super Bowl Ad of 2023
When you know, you know. And I knew as soon as I saw this ad that I could not possibly hate it more.
If only those were B-list celebs fighting, this could have ticked nearly every box. It's dramatically overproduced, with unnecessary references to 25-year-old movies. It's substantially longer than it has any need or right to be. It's not funny. But most importantly, the only thing that almost does qualify as a joke in this ad is the "punchline" that... it's actually an ad for Blue Moon. That's right, the joke is that all these brands are actually owned by the same mega-conglomerate and the fight was all kayfabe in the first place. I suppose Miller Lite has been on this corner for decades (the idea of people fighting over whether it mattered more that Miller Lite "tasted great" or was "less filling" somehow sustained us for years in the 80s) but I just could not find oligopoly less funny in this day and age.
