SuperBowl Ad Anticipation

There’s lots of blogs out there talking about the best and funniest Super Bowl ads from the other day. There were some pretty entertaining ads, but one of them still sticks out in my head as being the most effective.

I’m talking about the Miller High Life ad. All 0:01 of it.

A few days before the Super Bowl, Miller put out a commercial talking about 1 second ads and told us to keep an eye out for theirs during the super bowl. Throughout the entire first half it’s all my friends and I could talk about. 10-12 of us sat there through every commercial break looking to see the ad. A few times we’d ask if somebody else saw it, or if we missed it. When it eventually came on, a few of us did miss it. Thankfully, it’s preserved forever online. Here it is if you haven’t seen it:

So why was this ad so great? The ad itself wasn’t great, but the hype was. Selling a product on TV has very little to do with the ad itself, and lots to do with getting people to talk about your product. I’ll probably never buy a Miller High Life (I’m more of a whiskey/bourbon man) but somehow I managed to spend an entire evening talking about it with 10 other people and then still sit down to write this post. If you ask me, that’s one hell of an effective ad.

How many other people do you think sat there like we did waiting to see what the 1 second ad was all about? Many of us saw Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, but now fail to remember what product they were selling – others even got to see a few seconds of porno – but I’d be willing to bet that none of us forgot the High Life ad.

February 3rd, 2009