Ads Super Bowl 2010: A bag of chips and beer, Light On Gadget [Super Bowl]
Did you blink during the Super Bowl commercial breaks? Too bad if you did, because it means you may have missed the anemic number of gadget or tech-related commercials worth talking about tomorrow at the water cooler. But! Megan Fox!
Megan Fox is an obvious choice, for obvious reasons (if she’s your thing): She had a Motoblur, and we’re a gadget blog! See? Obvious. Anyway, tweeting from a tub on her new phone, she pondered what would happen if she sent a picture of her bathing out to the world. Hijinks ensued, people were hurt, and even a gay couple somehow got distracted by the fox that is Megan Fox:
And such is the power of Fox that there were scenes that didn’t make the final cut.
Then there was Beyonce, fresh off her Grammy performance, performing again for Vizio. Surrounded by Internet memes and celebrities, Twitter and what appeared to be an army of automobile assembly line robots (hopefully not ones from Toyota), she sang and sold that company’s Via/Internet Apps technology. Think Internet on your HDTV, not because I say so or because that’s exactly what it is, but because that’s the message Vizio assaulted viewers with during the 60-second clip:
Tough love was the story for Intel’s Jeffrey the Robot. The commercial was supposedly for Intel’s Core processor line, but I know the truth: Robot uprising. It 20 years’ time we can all look back at this commercial, when poor Jeffrey was snubbed For The Last Time by his human overlords:
Lastly, there’s one we actually covered yesterday. Google. Its poignant ad about a search-happy boy in love with a French girl aired yesterday, on the Internet, which is probably fitting. We’ll revisit it again here if you missed it tonight:
Sigh.
Sigh.Personally, for me the ads were a bit stale this year. Even the Bud Light beer ads, which have made me laugh out loud on occasion in years past, felt a little tired. Betty White was a standout though, and there were back-to-back ads depicting grown men in their underwear. Possibly a first there. Also a first: Seeing a two-timing baby talk about eTrade while his “milk-a-holic” girl on the side blew up his shit over a webcam.
The one Bud Light ad I will give props to, however, was their Autotune bit. It’s a stretch including here on Gizmodo, but we have a history with that app (iPhone, anyone?), and we’ll take an opportunity here to thank Budweiser for hopefully killing the tech off for good with this Super Bowl ad:
OK, I admit it, I smiled a bit watching that a second time. Guilty.
The entire crop is over at YouTube in one convenient package (Fox’s is notably absent at the moment, although they appear to be updating throughout the night).
Jack Loftus
Via Gizmodo
The old adage, “I just watch the Superbowl for the commercials” is dead to me.
Having looked through this years offering, I can’t help but conclude that the Superbowl just didn’t bring the funny in sufficient quantities.
Betty White did stand out, however.
robooneus
Canada gets none of the good commercials.
CardboardZebra
I watched from Canada, and all I got was the same commercial for the olympics over, and over again.
leozuck
The Google ad was poetry, which is not what I expect from Superbowl ads, but it tugged at me by simply stating a beautiful use of a company in a reliable way. You cannot ask for more.
nowayman
@mecha2142: totally awesome profile pic!
x@ck3D
I’m getting pretty sick of the godaddy commercials. Using sex appeal is one thing, porn during primetime (**cough Janet Jackson SBXXXVIII**) is another.
ColbertSuperNationalist
If only Megan could act…
Nitesh Singh
@Th12eat: Tech ads don’t win by explaining how the tech works, they win by telling you how much better your life is with the tech. Its pretty hard to lay that out with just a processor, and for intel, if your watching the superbowl, you probably weren’t going to be purchasing the tech directly. Intel’s goal is to make sure that when your ordering your next 500 dollar computer from Dell, or whoever, you choose Intel rather than AMD.
ddhboy
The one commercial that blew my mind was the one for The Late Show with Letterman, Oprah and Jay Leno. That had to be a phony Leno, but I couldn’t tell that it was.
Hyman Decent
@Th12eat: Agreed. All the tech-illiterates at my party were extremely confused (despite being sober). But jeffrey the robot grabbed the attention, not the i cores, unfortunately.
ColbertSuperNationalist
The intel robot was probably the most adorable and lovable thing ever, so cool!
djrice91
disappointed with the Google commercial, i really thought it was gonna be something that made “hell freeze over” or w/e , not some stupid use our search engine that mostly everyone already uses crap haha :
vinterchaos
I liked the Volkswagen commercial, just for the way it ended.
Ozzie’s Secret Code Name: MisterWho
I swear like 50% of the ads this year were for Doritos…
Sirobin
Interestingly enough, Google changed the “AA120″ in their ad to “DL 8601″, probably because for a brief moment “AA1″ brings up autocompletes for “AA1 shotgun.”
MePerson
Did the Intel commercial make anyone else mad? I mean, maybe it’s because I’m a computer salesmen at Best Buy, but Intel has done a particularly shitty job of outlining what the Intel i core has to offer. Instead of re-explaining it to people over and over again why an Intel i7 1.6ghz mobile core is better then an Intel Core 2 Duo, they could have simply explained, in laymen terms, how the processor benefits you, the viewer. Instead, they had a guy saying it’s the “most amazing technological achievement in the history of the company”.
On a lighter note, I had this tangent mid commercial and I ended up having to explain what the i core DID have to offer to the entire party lol (try talking about i cores to a drunk guy waiting for the next Bud Light commercial).
Th12eat
unless you classify cars as gadgets. there seemed to be like 3 every commercial break.
marty
This is the first time I’ve really watched the SuperBowl in a while and even while I was watching them I thought the ads felt kinda flat.
Almost seemed like it was all beer and Doritos commercials.
Serpentor X
I laughed out loud when the guy on the ladder fell in the Motorola commercial. I don’t really get the attraction to Megan Fox, but to each his own.
That Google ad was pretty touching, though.
mecha2142
The etrade commercials were good, the old ones were getting stale. Past there the doritos commercial (the later one) with the like..durito samurai, made me laugh.
MavrixWK