Super Bowl Adstravaganza: 2nd Quarter

By Spencer Hall
Spencer Hall has all the dirt on today’s best ads, in his live blog. Refresh this page for the latest entries, and look for new entries each quarter. Sporting News’ Vinnie Iyer blogs today’s action on the field. Awful Announcing’s Brian Powell blogs throughout the Super Bowl broadcast.
Half: Ideacast is looking for Ted, and I’m waiting for Tom Petty to come on, open his mouth, and exhale a cloud of ancient dust from his 15,000 year-old lungs on the halftime show.
7:42 p.m. I will not say it is a good ad, per se. But I will say that any time a man in a mouse suit jumps through a wall and starts beating someone up for a bag of Doritos, something great and important is happening on television.
7:40 p.m. Massive points to the “Five” ad with Duane Wade and Charles Barkley. “I don’t wanna look too fat in HD. That’s why you shouldn’t eat shrimp.” I have no idea that real-life conversations with Charles Barkley are exactly like this.
7:29 p.m. Carlos Mencia plans on blowing up the Pentagon tonight. I’m typing that in vain hope that the FBI will see this, he will be arrested, sent to Cuba, and then never heard from again. Sadly, the first Bud Light ad he appears in and the rest of them were filmed weeks ago, so the crimes to our nation have already happend.
7:25 Hey, thanks to the Anti-drug Council, I now know I don’t have to go down to the corner and buy drugs from a dealer to get high. I can just look in my parents’ medicine cabinet! Thanks, Anti-drug Council! Sincerely, teenage drug user.
7:15 p.m. Budweiser trots out another ad involving a horse and a Rocky reference, meaning that the ad asks you, the viewer, to assume horses really care about towing a big heavy cart of beer around. They don’t. Horses only care about sugar and carrots.
The Iron Man preview looks great, and appropriately, they’ve cast Robert Downey Jr. as a superhero with a drinking problem. Well-struck, Hollywood.
Toyota Badgers/Livin’ the Dream. I’ve been waiting for badgers ripping peoples faces off to go mainstream for so long...and at last, in 2008, it happens when Toyota puts a man in a car with a sleeping mama badger and then fires a cannon next to the car. He’s safe because it’s quiet! Oh, but the cell phone’s on. Face-ripping hilarity ensues!
Garmin’s Napoleon Ad. Another stellar contribution: rapid fire Franco-punk, a tiny little car zipping all over Paris, and a random Napoleon joke to boot. I’m in.

7:00 p.m. Bridgestone Ad: Squirrel. Screaming animals and a screaming woman, all quieted by a suave middle-aged man in a leather jacket spinning his Bridgestones deftly around an indecisive squirrel in the middle of the road. This ad tells my dad he’s slick and in control, meaning it works. PASS.
“Message from your heart.” The message is that you had to enter a contest to get me to listen to your song, and that your song sucks the suck of the ancients.
GoDaddy.com’s Teaser porn. You have to go to the site to watch the rest of it! Which you won’t, and neither will I!
Carrier Pigeons/FedEx. WINNAH! Giant Mutant pigeons causing mayhem in an office and the surrounding city. Think Cloverfield, but with soothing cooing pigeon noises instead of alien growling.
Cars.com “Death Match.” Glondor the glass-handed madman is another winner for Cars.com. A world where death matches can occur at anytime is a world that makes me want to purchase automobiles I haven’t even seen with my own eyes.

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