The Five Best 2012 Super Bowl Commercials
By Ty Duffy
Teleflora.com: This should be accompanied by a Tim Allen grunt, but we will defend it. This was perfect timing for Valentine’s Day. The target audience stopped cold and watched the commercial. It rode the line GoDaddy cheaply drives a sledgehammer through every year. It gets the nod over the Fiat ad, because subtle lipstick application is classier than a dollop of cappuccino foam on the sternum. The trouble with this commercial is it was self-defeating. Men will think Teleflora.com when they want to buy flowers. Women will know why they thought Teleflora.com and not be wooed with the flowers as intended.
Acura: This wasn’t realistic. Seinfeld, a noted Porsche fiend, would never drive an Acura. We must also downgrade it slightly for reminding us that Jay Leno existed. We liked the Soup Nazi. As a perpetually bottlenecked New Yorker, we find the notion of Manhattan zip lines liberating and awesome. Like most of the Seinfeld canon, this would have been funnier in collaboration with Larry David.
Samsung: Ah, the Darkness. This song emerged when we were in college, meaning we are now officially old enough to have college nostalgia targeted at us to market product. Fortunately, it is still for slick new phones, not safe cars with kid room. Paradoxically, this also makes us old enough to remember when people used Palm Pilots. Steve Jobs made the stylus cumbersome and redundant. For full affect we would have gone with “Float On” by Modest Mouse.
Honda: This season’s most hyped commercial. It was fine. It was funny. The walrus scene should have been in the 30-second edit. What we would say is it streamed past the point of selling the product into gratuitous celebrity cameo and masticating it for a week on the Internet soiled the delivery. Matthew Broderick may look old, but he still looks human.
Volkswagen: VW was not going to beat last year’s Star Wars Kid ad. That said, we’ll take cute anthropomorphic dogs and any Star Wars mention not involving George Lucas contorting his best work into yet one more theatrical release.
[Photo via Getty]