Super Bowl commercials are almost as important as the game itself. Year in and year out ad agencies try to capture the imaginations of the viewers of the game, and in a lot of cases people tune into the game, just to watch the ads. This year’s batch of commercials had every from a produced live (and on the fly) Hyundai ad, to several trailers for some of the year’s biggest, upcoming blockbuster movies, to teenage photos of some of your favourite celebrities. Here are our favourites.
Director Peter Berg did something incredible for his Hyundai ad. After the game finished he filmed his commercial from a U.S. military base in Poland. Using state of the art technology he helped three solders feel like they were sitting in the middle of the stadium in Houston with their families. It was a touching moment, with a strong message. Their Tweet afterwards said “These soldiers couldn’t be home for #SuperBowl, so we brought home to them.” It truly is a special commercial.
Most of us can agree that we’re not the biggest fans of our high school yearbooks photos, but Honda decided to put the spotlight directly on them. In their commercial they gathered some of those photos of our favourite celebrities to show us what they looked like back then. From Amy Adams, to Viola Davis, Jimmy Kimmel and Tina Fey, you can see see what they all looked like before they were famous. The actors and actresses even decided to do their own voice over work for it. And in case you were wondering, the photos are real.
Good Super Bowl commercials can be touching, but sometimes the ones that stand out are also very funny. Such was the case for Squarespace’s ad starring John Malkovich. In it he struggles to purchase his name as a domain name, only to find someone else already owns it. He spends the rest of the commercial trying to answer the question of who.
Who would have ever envisioned Christopher Walken and Justin Timberlake sharing the same space? Bai Antioxidant Infusions did when they put together this 30 second commercial with Walken reading the lyrics to *NSYNC’s Bye Bye Bye, with Timberlake sitting nearby.
And of course we couldn’t have this story on Super Bowl commercials without bringing up Budweiser’s timely commercial that highlights the immigration issues currently going on in the U.S. today. The one minute ad tells the origin of the company, tracing it all the way back to German immigrant Adolphus Busch.
