Saturday Night Live's MacGruber spoof of both MacGyver (with the real Richard Dean Anderson!) and Pepsi was somewhat of an indictment of where TV advertising is heading. Is it really all that far off the mark to think television advertising will end up something like the third skit? Here are all three of the skits (p.s. enjoy the game!):
Update: Variety reports what you knew all along -- these really were Pepsi commercials.
MacGruber Skit #1:
MacGruber Skit #2:
MacGruber Skit #3:
Ah, the future of advertising in a DVR world…
Okay, it was a little over the top. 1st one, funny. 2nd one, more than obvious. 3rd one, just plain ‘hammer against the cranium’ annoying.
Yes, things are changing as consumers get more control over their ability to view entertainment sans infomercials/commercials. But advertisers can benefit from being smarter and treating consumers less like Gitmo detainees (actually, those people are treated incredibly well compared to cable news viewers) and more like thinking, discerning people who need to buy certain products in good times or bad.
Or they could all just hire Vince from Shamwow or Billy Mays (from everything else)…
I have no problem with this and actually enjoy them. When shows can turn product placement into a joke it can work. Arrested Development did this, Scrubs did this and 30 Rock did this. (I’m sure others have as well.)
I’d bet all the money I have (left) that NBC didn’t ‘sell out all the ads’ for the SB. I bet it sold as many as it could and then filled up the rest with NBC/Universal/USA/Univision/PSA/etc to ensure that commercials do run in between each clock stoppage and time out. But it sure doesn’t look like there are all that many non-NBC affiliated commercials being aired. Even during halftime I walked away for 24 minutes and I missed a whopping ’1′ commercial for an actual advertiser. I TIVOd it back to be sure I hadn’t actually missed something but it was just Springsteen and NBC promos taking up the extra-long halftime.
NBC is just straight up lying. They claim they are getting $3M for a 30 sec ad but they are probably having to cut deal after deal on the side to get these spots filled. There is a recession, plus neither of the teams is in a major media market and there are no major stars playing. (Plus, NBC spent all their production budget on Obama events already and they will be in debt until sometime around 2012).
I don’t know how we can verify what NBC says but I can’t see how NBC could claim to be better off than the guys who lost money last year on the Super Bowl.
I guess it can’t actually be better than the Super Bowl ads if it is a Super Bowl ad! They just ran the second ad above.
Nice to see RDA again, even if it was just a stupid commercial.
i thought it was really funny
that commercial wasn’t funny to me.
I liked the commercials for “Hulu”, “Bridgestone”, “Budweiser”, “Monster Job Search”, “Career Builder.com” and “NBC’s Heroes”.
Hulu’s got my vote for best commercial, with the Jason Statham Audi commercial coming in second. I like car chases.