Honda Super Bowl ads
A diamond and a dud: even-stevens for Honda's Super Bowl ad campaign‘Honda plans a star-studded Super Bowl’ was the announcement plastered identically all over the media this week, suggesting it was nicked straight off the press release. The company bought two spots, one for its own brand and one for its upmarket Acura label.
America’s football Super Bowl hosts the costliest TV advertising time in the world. It cracked a million dollars for a 30-second spot way back in 1995. By 2011 it was $3 million; this year it hit $3.5 million.
With that kind of money going on the media, advertisers don’t skimp on the material. Especially not now, with the opportunities the viral medium offers to give their ads a bit of longevity.
Honda’s efforts debuted to remarkably varied effect; which is to say, one’s great. The other? Well, to pinch from the Yello song used in its own soundtrack, ‘ohhhhhhh deeeeeeear...’.
The YouTube intros tell much about them. One’s elegant and matter-of-fact in describing what, surprisingly, they managed to resist calling two minutes of nothing (so we’ll stoop to that instead).
The other is something else entirely. It starts with a paragraph of that cloyingly bland, sentimental patois you only ever find in adland. What follows is two butt-puckering minutes of that cloyingly bland, sentimental patois you only ever find in adland. And while we’re not exactly talking the work of Hitchcock or Bogey and Betty here, how its star allowed himself to slash the nostalgia value of one of its era’s more memorable cinematic moments will remain between him and his bank manager.
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