Last Night's Super Bowl 'Debacle' A Bit Rosier in the Morning

Oh how the morning after brings clarity to the prior evening's dalliances. After having obsessively consumed over 40 ads, analyzing them and then writing about them all within a three to four hour period, we sat down this morning with a cup of coffee and did what ad people to the morning after: we watched the game again. Or, to clarify, we fast forwarded through the game and watched the commercials

We laughed. We smiled. We grinned. We even enjoyed that Will Ferrell commercial. And, we bathed in the beauty of Coke's beautiful balloon ballet. In the heat of the battle, people can be harsh and in some cases, we were. But from the perspective of the average viewer not hunched over a computer or in front of a conference room screen, most of the ads weren't so bad.

When it comes to the Super Bowl, we raise the bar of expectation quite high. Sometimes unreasonably high. Even the Sobe dancing lizards - complete with Naomi's not so great dancing and the farting lizards - wasn't the debacle some in the industry thought it was. In fact, akin to our less-than-critical morning after viewing, the spot landed itself a top ten slot in USAToday's Ad Meter, not that we're placing any great scientific validity to that particular metric. Then again, the popularity of a commercial is not directly linked to what it's really supposed to do: sell stuff.

So as we all bitch and moan this week about "the worst ad bowl in a long time," remember, we are not the audience. The customers of our clients are. It doesn't matter what we say. In fact, it doesn't even matter what they say. It matters what they do with their wallets and that not-so-small data point won't be tabulated for quite some time.