Super Bowl 2010 Ads: Rankings and Rants

Overall, an uninspiring collection of Super Bowl commercials last night.    Few disasters, few fabulous, a lot of just okay.    In most cases, each :30 ad was a $3 million investment ($2.5 million for air time, $500,000 ish for production) – so mediocre won’t exactly drive a return-on-investment.     Today’s Super Bowl ad chatter is mostly about entertainment, humor, and likability – and lots of fun.   Entertainment is swell, but advertising effectiveness – persuasion (making consumers feel differently about your brand) and incremental sales –  is what really matters.

Here are the winners from four marketing mavens – USAToday‘s AdMeter (popularity), Ad Age’s Bob Garfield (ad quality), Squawq (brands’ Twitter buzz), and me (effectiveness).

USA Today                               
Best:
1.   Snickers
2.   Doritos (dog collar)
3.   Bud Light (beer can house)
4.   Anheuser-Busch (Clydesdale friend)
5.   Coca-Cola (sleepwalker)

Swanson’s Inclusive Advertising: Stirring Sales Growth

Kudos to Swanson brand and parent company, Campbell Soup Company for its outstanding, inclusive print advertising campaign. The campaign features great chefs using, and providing recipes for, their delicious broths… and a delicious, authentic respect for diversity. While many companies are wisely striving for, but often struggling with, diversity, Swanson’s work is exemplary. They are elegantly appealing to caucasion ‘traditional families’ – AND the roughly 50% of the U.S. population that isn’t – appealing to millions of consumers that others overlook.