my favorite 2009 super bowl ads, etc.

Almost as much fun as the Monday morning analysis of the Super Bowl itself (a tremendous game that will bear years of discussion, to be sure) is the Monday morning analysis of the ads.

• Slate's Seth Stevenson runs his annual review this morning - as is often the case I tend to agree with him about most of the ads, and I suspect our wildly different assessments of the merits of Bruce Springsteen's performance to be due to largely generational concerns. Come on Seth. A referee came out and threw a penalty marker. Springsteen might as well have been doing an animated guest spot on Scooby Doo.

• In the New York Times, a short piece by Stuart Elliot that takes a largely dim view of this year's ads, "as if bonuses were being awarded on Madison Avenue for the least creative briefs".

• I'm trying and apparently failing to find a list of all of the advertisers during last night's Super Bowl. This video-annotated list at AdAge seems comprehensive, but I recall there being more than one ad for Monster.com and General Electric.

• Adweek has a chart with Nielsen's ratings and other data (including the price for a 30-second spot) for every past Super Bowl. 

• Jason Kottke - whose recent site redesign I have yet to become accustomed to - fills in the gap left by the advertising trade pubs and links to all of the movie trailer ads from the game.

My personal top 3 ads were:

3. Wieden + Kennedy's "Heist" ad for Coca-Cola is guilty of every charge leveled by Stuart Elliot in the Times piece linked above: it takes no risks, relying on tired Super Bowl ad tropes like anthropomorphic animals and familiar musical numbers. I love it anyway. I'll be damned if I'm going to drink the Coke that the dung beetle opened, though.

2. Toyota's ad for their Tundra pickup truck by Saatchi & Saatchi LA is so absurd (it drives up a flaming corkscrew ramp as a no-nonsense voice-over informs that the act of doing so is "not good" for your truck ) that I'm not sure if I'm laughing with the ad agency or at them.

1. Hulu's frank and open admission of their plot to gelatinize our brains and take over the world was without a doubt the funniest ad of the night - it should surprise no one that it was by Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

If you've found a complete list of all of the advertisers during the Super Bowl last night, let me know in the comments.

Comments

[Jon Schubin]

The Coke ad worked because of the camera angles. That shot where they go over the waterfall is really, really good.

That Toyota ad sucked.

[Nancy Martira]

You can watch each and every Super Bowl commercial at http://www.youtube.com/adblitz although I have no idea why you would want to do such a thing.