Angela's Super Bowl Analysis

Furious ad reviewing afforded only the time between commercials to shove popcorn and ice cream into our mouths. That means we missed most of the football, but we did catch a few highlights:

* Peyton Manning (predictably) kicked ass
* Coach Dungy of the Colts became the first African-American coach to take home a Super Bowl trophy
* Rex Grossman bums us out

That's all we have to say about that. With regard to the ads, our favourite was the Emerald Nuts Robert Goulet spot, with maybe Bud Light's Rock Paper Scissors in close second. We were not thrilled by Sales Genie or the number of times we had to sit through their repetitive, generic and overly long bits. They struck us as out of place.

Consumer-generated ads shined this season. This includes the Chevy HHR male stripper ad, apparently put together by a college co-ed, and that first Doritos spot. Maybe consumers can teach us a thing or two after all since major brands like Coke and TMobile didn't even bother creating a new spot for the Super Bowl.

There was slightly more online integration this year, with ads often sending people back to campaign URLs that were, of course, completely jammed up once the commercials aired. The common sentiment is that excepting a few gems this year's ad set was fairly uninspired. And this could be the case for a multitude of reasons, including the rising cost of spots, increasingly vocal criticism about advertising in general, and the consumer-generated ad movement.

Maybe the Super Bowl ad orgy is over the hill. In an ideal world this means the cost for spots will eventually lower and create an opening for new ideas to come to the forefront, like what we saw from consumers this year.

Overall a decent show.