I might compile more coherrent thoughts of Super Bowl XL and the commercials therein, but I wanted to get a post up regarding my initial thoughts.

If I was a Seahawks fan, I would have been very upset with the way the game was marketed and then run inside the game. One of the cool features ABC did was to have players tell what winning the Super Bowl would mean for them. I loved that feature, but there was only one feature of a Seahawks player out of around six. All others were Steelers.

The calls did not go Seattle’s way either. There were many calls that I don’t know what the refs were thinking. If they were balanced, then no problem, but I don’t think they were.

Yes, I picked Seattle to win and was rooting for them. That said, I am hardly upset with the outcome of the game so the above judgements aren’t taken from someone who was wanting to catch discrepencies in calls or promotions.

The commercials were rather weak this year. Budweiser, as always, had the most unique, humorous and memorable commercials. I like the revolving wall and the young clydesdale pulling the wagon with the help of the other clydesdales from behind. It pushes both the product and stays in tune with their previous campaigns.

Go Daddy tried to build off of last year’s commercials and I thought their commercial this year, which ran twice, wasn’t that impressive. Go Daddy doesn’t have enough of memorable advertising campaign to make second-year commercials, though they tried.

I still can’t figure out why Diet Pepsi paid all of that money to the various celebrities for such a lousy campaign. What was really odd about the Diet Pepsi commercial with Jackie Chan is that they showed their competitor, Diet Coke, but didn’t exactly make that product look inferior. That used to be taboo in advertising, and I don’t think times have changed in that regard.

The Burger King commercial was just odd. Coming from a company who had used old footage in their commercials which ran during NFL games all year, they could have done much, much better than to stage some sort of weird song and dance routine with people dressed up as lettuce, pickles, a hamburger and a bun. That single commercial was very, very strange to me.

Your thoughts on the game and/or commercials?

Update (Mac): You can watch all the commericals at Google Video (including an option to watch all of them back-to-back–about 20 minutes long). My favorite was the Bud “flasher” ad. Simple but funny and everyone can relate to it.

Update (Chad): Where was the Master Lock commercial?  They usually have one per year during the Super Bowl, but I didn’t see it this year.  The flasher ad was funny, but I would have loved to see paint on the sheep with some web address on it like the flasher who was at the Super Bowl last year or the year before, I can’t remember which.