Anheuser-Busch’s beer commercials at the Super Bowl underwhelm
Silly me: I had thought that the Super Bowl – 5 February 2012 – was the undisputed biggest moment of the year for America’s Ad Men. OK, it is also one of the highlights of the sporting calendar, if you are a fan of football.
Some of the biggest companies in the world would spend millions of dollars creating the perfect advert, knowing that making a splash will guarantee them huge kudos with their consumers.
Such is the importance of the event that the National Football League secured a broadcasting deal worth an estimated USD 250 million for the Super Bowl.
According to media reports, each 30-second slot cost around USD 3.5 million, with some prime moments during the game fetching USD 4 million. Even at those prices, and even in the worst financial downturn since the 1930s, host broadcaster NBC had sold out in November last year.
This year’s Super Bowl included four and a half minutes of commercials for Anheuser-Busch, making the brewer not only the exclusive beer advertiser but one of the top five Super Sunday spenders.
While their Super Bowl ads almost always made a big splash, this year they were a little drier.
Some of Anheuser-Busch’s spots were used to introduce Bud Light Platinum, which hit stores on 30 January. Judging from the clips available on the internet Anheuser-Busch presented the product in a fairly straightforward way.
Other spots, including one starring the Clydesdales horses, were more about creating feelings for the brand than having a laugh.
This is definitely a change in tone for Anheuser-Busch’s well-known sense of humour, culminating in the quirky "Whassup?" commercial campaign for Budweiser (1999 –2002). Although these commercials often were accused of frat-boy humour with misogynistic overtones, they still proved memorable.
Not so this year’s fare. No wonder Advertising Age, the ad men’s leading trade publication, wasn’t too impressed with Anheuser-Busch’s Super Bowl commercials.
In fact, Ad Age’s Ken Wheaton wrote: “If there’s an opposite of most improved, Anheuser-Busch would take home the prize. It’s almost as if there’s no clear marketing leader over there. It was enough to make me long for the days of Bud Bowl.”
Perhaps the brewer’s shift in tone may have something to do with the country having reverted back to its more prudish roots. Risk-taking, rule-breaking ideas were as hard to find among the more than 50 commercials as a piece of skin in Madonna’s outfits during her Super Bowl half-time performance.
The former bullet-bra-wearing pop queen played it very vanilla as she danced and sang a medley of her greatest hits. In her final number she even wore a very chaste full-length coat and lived up to her promise that she would not bare it all – unlike Janet Jackson, whose 2004 Nipplegate "wardrobe malfunction" will be remembered for ever.
Which left me wondering: why tune in to the Super Bowl at all?
