Animals dominate top spots
| • | Private parts take center stage in battle of Super Bowl ads |
| • | Vote for your favorite Super Bowl ad |
By Bruce Horovitz
USA Today
In the dog-eat-dog world of creating great Super Bowl spots, Anheuser-Busch has once again made the rest of the marketing giants roll over.
For a record sixth consecutive year, the beer giant easily won USA Today's exclusive Ad Meter consumer ranking of the top Super Bowl commercials with an ad featuring a painfully preppie dog walker. His pedigreed border collie is outperformed by a working stiff's mutt that bites the yuppie's crotch to get him to give up his Bud Light.
In fact, ad watchers might have felt more as if they were watching Animal Planet than the Super Bowl. Each of the top four ads featured animals. Pepsi clawed its way to the No. 2 slot with a spot featuring a bear that disguises itself as a grizzled bear hunter to pass a check for Pepsi at a convenience store.
A Clydesdale-wannabe donkey finished third for Anheuser-Busch, followed by another A-B ad featuring a gas-passing horse that spoils a sleigh-ride date.
Anheuser-Busch flexed its marketing muscle to claim six of Ad Meter's top 10. Several of its ads had an almost frat-house overtone that included bathroom humor.
One year after a somewhat subdued Super Bowl atmosphere in which America prepared for war in Iraq, advertisers let loose with an R-rated comedy club for Super Bowl viewers.
"It was a good mirror of what's going on in TV overall. Dumb is funny. Jessica Simpson is funny," says Donny Deutsch, CEO of Deutsch Inc., whose agency created Super Bowl spots for Mitsubishi, Monster.com and Expedia.com.
The Ad Meter focus group members surveyed second-by-second all the spots broadcast during a game watched in the United States by an estimated 90 million people.
