Super Bowl Commercials: a sport all its own

Watching the annual Super Bowl commercials has become quite the spectator sport.

Of course, not so long ago you had to actually watch the game in order to see the commercials. Now, of couse, all of the commercials are readily available the day after on various websites.

For those of you who missed the commercials, and for those of us living outside the US and not able to view these, here are two websites feauring all of the spots:

Advertising Age

Mashable 

I haven’t had the chance to view all of these yet, but I writer I admire, Thom Forbes in his MediaPost blog, was less impressed with this year’s collection. From the ones I’ve viewed thus far, I must admit I agree with his comments that ”it was all much ado about mediocrity.”

Do you agree?

Super Bowl TV Commercials: Best, Funniest, Overpowering

Marketing and Sports Are Interwoven on Super Bowl Sunday.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday in America.

This means the two most talked about topics for the next 48 hours will be a football game and the advertising shown during the commercial breaks of the TV broadcast.

I cannot tell you much about the game itself, except that most forecasters predict a closely fought battle between two evenly matched teams.

But to get you into the marketing mood for the TV commercials, here are two compilations of previous Super Bowl commercials worth watching:

10 Super Bowl Ads That Overpowered Their Products

Are These the 10 Funniest Super Bowl Commercials Ever?

You can also vote at Huffington Post on some of the best Super Bowl commercials of all time.

Enjoy.

And let us know what you think about these spots in the comments section below. Which is your all-time favorite?

Super Bowl Ads

One of the most anticipated advertising events each year is the showing of new television commercials during the American Super Bowl football championship game.

The game which was played this past Sunday night, attracted an audience of approximately 97.5 million people in American, and countless millions more across the world. A tight contest,this was the most watched Super Bowl in history.

Thirty-second TV commercials during the game reportedly cost as much as US$3 million per spot.

Anheuser-Busch aired the best-liked Super Bowl ad for a record 10th-consecutive year, according to results of the Super Bowl Ad Meter real-time consumer focus group testing. Unlike many previous winners, the Anheuser-Busch ad did not rely on humor. Instead, it featured a Dalmatian who becomes personal trainer to a dejected draft horse eager to make the team pulling the famous Budweiser beer wagon.

The other Top 10 ads:

FedEx (FedEx beats giant carrier pigeons)

Bridgestone (critters scream with squirrel missed by car)

Doritos (gian rat goes for guy’s bag of chips)

Bud Light (fire-breather heats up romantic dinner)

Bud Light (men sneak beer into wine-and-cheese party)

Coca-Cola (cartoon-character parade balloons go after Coke Classic)

Diet Pepsi Max (star-studded cast stops dozing)

Planters (scent of nuts makes homely woman alluring)

Tide to Go (shirt stain is louder than a job candidate) tied with SoBe Life Water (Lizards dance with model Naomi Campbell)

You can watch all the Super Bowl ads as often as you like courtesy of Advertising Age at http://adage.com/superbowl08/article?article_id=124815.