If the b2b ads that ran on this year's Super Bowl telecast were football players, they'd have been linemen. That is to say, these ads didn't produce any thrilling, creative touchdowns, but they did deliver on the basics of advertising—the blocking and tackling.
We'll compare GoDaddy.com's ads during the telecast to offensive linemen, because that was what the company was going for: offensive. This year's two spots, however, were apparently not as offensive as the company's ads from Super Bowls past, because they weren't rejected by NBC's censors.
One of this year's spots, “Body Paint,” employed the kind of wooden, utilitarian dialogue usually reserved for adult movies. “This is some crazy way to draw attention to .co domain names for GoDaddy,” race-car driver Danica Patrick says as she brushes some body paint on an apparently nude model.
The GoDaddy ads were clunky, but perhaps purposefully so. It may be hard to say that ads featuring body painting were workmanlike efforts, but by now this kind of titillating advertising, produced in-house, is the core of GoDaddy.com's playbook. The spots suggested that even more borderline nudity is available on the Internet, driving traffic to GoDaddy's websites, where, presumably, interested parties might learn more about GoDaddy's .co and cloud offerings.
Conventional wisdom says you can't go wrong using animals in advertising. CareerBuilder, in its in-house-produced spot, adhered again to this conventional wisdom, if boringly so.
Last year, monkeys drove automobiles and sealed a poor workingman in his vehicle by pulling up way close in the parking lot. This year, the put-upon workingman goes on a business trip with a crew of chimps that order too many banana daiquiris—quite the lame gag.
The ad suggested the place to change all that is CareerBu-ilder.com. This spot underwhelmed our animal spirits even though it probably did what it's supposed to do: get a lot of resumes posted on the company's job board.
General Electric Co.'s spots during this year's Super Bowl were early Valentines to its workers, particularly those in its manufacturing plants.
The commercials, produced by BBDO, New York, featured proletarian beauty shots of the factory floor and words of wisdom from GE employees. In one spot, a worker at a GE turbine factory says, “When I was a kid, I wanted to work with my hands. That was my thing. I really enjoy building turbines. It's nice to know what you're building is going to do something for the world.”
And that something is ... helping Budweiser make beer.
Seriously, that's how the ad closed, with GE pointing out that its turbines provide the energy necessary to help brew Bud. Chasers guesses there's no more appropriate time for this message than Super Bowl Sunday.
