Ah, yes: the Super Bowl ads! I don’t just mean the much anticipated and widely hyped ads made for and starring in the ad breaks during the televised airing of the Super Bowl each year, but rather, ads that are related to the Super Bowl itself. Sometimes these ads are good, and sometimes they’re bad; and when they’re bad, boy they can really be counter-productive!
When the Giants beat the Patriots in 2008, Disney ran an ad where Eli Manning said he’s going to Disney World, and then they showed what really looked like a Patriots helmet flying through the clouds, as though it had been thrown in celebration. It was claimed later on that it was just a silver helmet with an NFL logo on it, but I would have sworn it was a Patriots helmet, and most people who saw it as such also thought the spot completely disrespected the Giants, as though the ad agency decided that the Giants had so little chance of winning the Super Bowl, that they didn’t even bother making a version of that ending with the Giants helmet. But whether it was a Patriots helmet or not, the fact that it looked exactly like one is just as bad, really, because it’s unthinkingly sloppy, and it looked disrespectful. Unless they meant to suggest that the Giants so aggressively crushed the Patriots that one of their helmets came flying off with a Patriots player’s head still inside, and was knocked so high up into the air, that it went soaring through the clouds; but the game wasn’t one-sided like that. But there was another game that was rather one sided like that, and there was an ad made for it that made the wrong call too: The Wheaties Fuel ad with Payton Manning.
This spot was done just two years later, so after that mistake by Disney, you’d think a company like Wheaties would have known better than to make the very same mistake, but I guess not. Yes, this lovely commercial was shown just before and for months after Drew Brees and the New Orleans Saints defeated Payton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts in 2010, and by a whopping score line of 31-17 to boot. So this ad said that Wheaties Fuel gives you what you need to win, and showed Payton Manning throwing footballs out in a wheat field. But he lost, didn’t he? And every time I saw that ad after he had lost the Super Bowl, it made me think that Wheaties Fuel gives you what you need to lose, and that they really should have signed Drew Brees up for an ad too, just in case the Saints won. But I guess they decided that there was no way the Saints could possibly defeat “the greatest quarterback of all time” (which is what everyone on TV was calling Payton Manning at the time. And he’s great, but still: it was very disrespectful to Brees and the Saints to behave that way, and it bit Wheaties in the ass, too, when the Saints won).
Anyway, running these Wheaties ads with Payton Manning, who had just lost the Super Bowl by a large margin, and saying their cereal gives you what you need to win, simply made Wheaties look ridiculous, and it rubbed the loss in twice as badly for Payton Manning, while at the same time completely disrespecting Drew Brees. That right there is what I’d call a PR disaster as well. Oh well, maybe they don’t care if they look like idiots. But when companies pick winners before big games, and they lose, and then run the ads anyway without fixing them, they just look like gamblers who lost everything on a sucker bet, and then who have their shame and bad judgment shown for all the world to see over and over, again and again on TV (and they pay for it, too). It’s kind of like if the losing team wore all those hats and t-shirts they had made up that says they’re the world champions, even after they’ve lost the game. And that’s just dumb.
Here is the Wheaties Fuel commercial I’m talking about (but someone else has overdubbed a snarky joke soundtrack over the original):
It’s funny to note that while they don’t have the original ad up here for us to make fun of now, they ran the actual ad on TV for months and months after the Super Bowl loss. Duh.
And here’s a version of that Giants Super Bowl Ad (they say it’s not a Patriots helmet, but it was {or it sure looked like it was!} when it ran on TV: I would have sworn it was back then!):
