Your Super Bowl ABInbev Ads: Rated!

So you saw the Super Bowl last night, or you read a newspaper story about the tragic loss of Steely McBeam‘s team and the hilarious victory of Brett Favre’s ex-team. I can add nothing to help you understand what happened there. But I can tell you that I paid very close attention to all the drinking-related ads that ran, all of them brought to you by ABInbev and each varying in terms of overall quality. Rather than compare them to some Ideal Super Bowl ad or even to the other Super Bowl 2011 ads, I ranked them 1-5 against each other.

Hack Job

In the first quarter, ABInbev ran two ads, Hack Job and Product Placement. The first has a simple enough premise, spoofing the home-redesign shows that were all the rage approximately six years ago and yet still linger around.

OK, funny enough, but not really funny enough and, as I already mentioned, a little tone deaf in its choice of spoof targets. But I give them credit for escaping the Woman as Sex Object meme that permeates most light beer ads and the cartoonish violence that has taken over Super Bowl ads of the last handful of years. The woman is naggy and doesn’t appreciate beer, so it’s not as if they completely escaped pedestrian gender-typing, but, a step is a step.

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Product Placement

The second ad, Product Placement, satirizes the over-the-top product placement that has made Brand Spotting a favorite film-based drinking game in the right households (mine). Since, Budweiser is one of the major offenders of permeating the celluloid with their various products, this ad almost gains hipster credit for being self-aware and therefore “ironic.” Almost. The ad is too raucous and the gimmicks too predictable to effectively trigger a laugh.

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Tiny Dancer

The second quarter brought one ad, Tiny Dancer, for Budweiser. In it Peter Stormare plays an iconic high plains drifter complete with jangling spurs, a five o’clock shadow, and a dusty duster. We see his gun twice, once gratuitously before he enters the saloon, and then again after the barkeep tells him they are out of the Budweiser he’s ordered.

But the delivery guy who has ridden his Clydesdales all the way from St. Louis (apparently) arrives just in time and the desperado takes a plug of the gold stuff and breaks out into Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” But why “Tiny Dancer?” I can only assume it’s because the song is “soft,” “effeminate,” or…more crassly “gay.” I’m not one to necessarily shy away from certain kinds of bigotry in jokes. It’s risky business. T be fair,  I’m not sure that homophobia was the point of the song choice. The problem is, for me, I don’t understand the song choice and so the joke doesn’t work for me. The Three Amigos sang “My Little Buttercup.” That was hilarious.

But the thing there was the singers were entertainers and they were doing one of their bits. The laughs come at the expense of the other bar denizens who don’t really understand what is going on and in fact are being terrorized by the song. The irony here is not just the song choice and the joke doesn’t wholly or even specifically derive from overtures to homosexuality, but rather from the reversal of expectations within the frame and the actual fulfillment of expectations to the audience (us). And if the point was to show the desperado as being “sensitive” or similar, why not something more hip, more Super Bowly? Katy Perry perhaps, or …I don’t know..are the Jonas Brothers still hip?

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Crying Crooner

In the third quarter we got the most anticipated of the beer ads, The Crooner starring Adrien Brody as a (French?) jazz singer with a song lamenting a missing love. The women in the audience, swoon, cry, and bat their eyes, but, it turns out that the “belle” the crooner croons for is Stella. “She is a thing of beauty.”

I actually thought this one hit dead on. It was a cool, it sounded good, it looked good. I’m a sucker for the imagery in this ad, and I’m a sucker for Adrien Brody (I even recently watched his Predator movie). This scene, a foreign jazz bar has a good blend of divey proletariat and bourgeois class that I think can help move Stella in our crowded import market. Stella is a known commodity here and I think most people think of it in exactly the way this ad looks, as accessible class. I’m not saying that is true of Stella, that it’s “class,” I’m not even sure that that would mean. But that is the impression I think people have of it and I think this ad will resonate. Besides, I would like to see more ads put beer in this light. Here’s a social event with Stella at its heart, but the scene is not raucous or lurid. It’s sophisticated and romantic. Maybe the Super Bowl audience is wrong for this ad, but I liked it.

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Dog Sitter

Finally in the fourth quarter, we get the ad that I predict is the crowd favorite, Dog Sitter. Again, remarkably simple premise: guy is dog sitting and he is told in the first frame that “the dogs are really smart and they will do whatever you tell them.” Oh, and “there’s a ton of Bud Light in the fridge.” So the guy hosts a party…full of hot chicks…and the dogs are the servers. The ridiculousness of dogs pouring drafts and barbecuing burgers is completely accepted and also pretty funny (because it’s unexpected and funny looking). The commercial ends with the fully expected but still iconic image of dogs playing poker while the human cleans up after the party he held. Ta Da! A Super Bowl ad! I liked The Crooner better but I suspect this one fares well in the crowd sourcing world.

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Related articles

• Super Bowl Ads 2011: The Good, the Bad, the Obnoxious (blogher.com)
• “Super Bowl Ads Commercials” and related posts (humorpower.com)
• Super Bowl 2011 Ads Go Viral: Vote Your Pick! (cbsnews.com)
• Bringing the funny still makes for a winning Super Bowl ad (theglobeandmail.com)