Here's the definitive compendium of all 2009 Super Bowl commercials already online.
Everyone knows that if your team isn't in the Super Bowl, the biggest (perhaps only) reason to watch are the commercials. Some companies have decided to leak their own Super Bowl spots online so ad geeks have something to drool over before Sunday night. Fast Company has just about all of the currently available spots right here. Keep in mind, each of these commercials cost their companies $3 million to run.
SoBe
Fast Companyfeatured this video yesterday, which features three enormous NFL players pirouetting and dancing with lizards.
Monster.com
Here's Monster.com's spot, which promises some lucky football fans the job of their dreams.
Audi
Audi's highly-touted spot starring Jason Statham should make it to a few critics' top-five lists come Monday morning. Here's the teaser.
Cars.com
Cars.com's quirky spot (first unearthed by Jalopnik) looks and feels like a mediocre Wes Anderson movie.
Hyundai
The car buffs over at Jalopnik.com have posted (and graded) all five of Hyundai's new Super Bowl commercials.
(click the image for the jump)
Doritos
The chip maker is taking the crowdsourcing route this year: The winners of a user-submitted Doritos commercials contest (voted by the public) will have their commercial debut on the air during the big game. All five of the remaining contestants are great.
(click the image for the jump for the top 5)
Coca-Cola
Coke has (at least) two new commercials airing during this year's game. The first, "Avatar," is a delightful little spot straight out of Second Life (or World of Warcraft).
A strange but amusing ad from the online classifieds giant, called "It May Be Time." It also may have been time to trim about thirty seconds off this commercial in the editing room a few days ago.
There are two Pepsi Max spots running this year, both aimed at the elusive "male diet cola drinking" demographic. The first, called "I'm Good," is funny because it's true. Men, you know we really say that whenever we get hurt!
This great ad from the Dutch brewmeisters stars character actor John Turturro. It's half Coen Brothers scene, half public servant announcement, but it works.
Unlike the ads for its zero-calorie cousin, this ad for regular Pepsi is a mashup of footage of free-loving hippies and YouTube-era millenials. The common theme? Their love of Pepsi, of course. Also: Not so sure that will.i.am is this generation's Bob Dylan.
For its first-ever Super Bowl commercial, Denny's will "bring dignity back to breakfast" by showing mafiosos eating sugary, confectionary meals (no doubt made by Denny's competitors).
The tiremaker has two ads for the big game this year. Unfortunately, only teasers for both have been released. Damn you, Bridgestone, you masters of suspense!!
(click the image for the jump, teaser for "Hot Item")
(click the image for the jump, teaser for "Taters")
Two ads will appear during the Super Bowl from this online hosting and domain service. Both feature female IndyCar driver Danica Patrick knocking the gender-equality movement a few steps back. Remarkably stupid, even for GoDaddy.com. Poor form.
(click the image for the jump, to "Showering Danica Patrick)
(click the image for the jump, to "Enhanced Hearing")
And you thought Janet Jackson's Nipplegate was risque. The ad, featuring a bevy of beauties doing all sorts of unmentionable things to vegetables was a little too hot for NBC. It won't air during the Super Bowl on Sunday, but why should you get cheated out of viewing a little veggie love.
Would you de-friend ten of your Facebook friends in order to get a free Whopper? Burger King thinks you will. Released on Jan. 1, the Whopper Sacrifice facebook app asks users that very question. The app, from the offbeat advertising gurus at Crispin Porter + Bogusky (profiled in the June issue of Fast Company), is the most aggressive online venture that Burger King has yet undertaken. It's equal parts humor and tongue-in-cheek malice, since the app notifies your former friends via Facebook message that they have been "sacrificed" for a free burger. Let's take a look at some numbers: if Burger King expects to give away, say, 10,000 free Whoppers, that will require the de-friending of 100,000 people. Out of 150 million total Facebookers, that's a paltry 0.0006 percent of users. But Burger King isn't trying to give out free Whoppers; the Whopper Sacrifice is simply a very smart venture into online advertising.
Of course, part of the brilliance of this application is that Burger King is well versed in the culture and mores of the Facebook generation. BK knows that very, very few people are likely to legitimately use the app as a means to spitefully rid their "friends" list of ten enemies. If there is any de-friending at all it will more than likely be done in a joking manner, and Burger King wants it that way. Facebook is rife with in-jokes and customs. Some Facebook lingo has even joined the contemporary lexicon ("friending," "de-tagging," etc.). In this sense, Burger King isn't actually using Facebook as a means to purchase Whoppers (since you obviously can't buy them online). What happens then is that the app becomes much less of a standard "Pirates vs. Ninjas"-type application – a program designed to bring people closer together online. Instead, the Whopper Sacrifice is rather like a provocative billboard, one which would elicit a visceral reaction on the part of the viewer. However, Burger King hopes that at least part of the viewer's reaction involves the purchase of a Whopper.
This campaign is textbook Crispin Porter + Bogusky – quirky, cool, funny, and weird, all at the same time. It's hard to imagine that people will actually sacrifice friendships for free fast food. But that's not the point, and CP + B isn't trying to destroy the institution of friendship. They're simply trying to get people talking about Whoppers, and they're succeeding.
Google is losing consumer confidence. It recently dropped below the top 20 of companies that consumers feel do the best job at safeguarding personal information.
The Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe recently released its annual report detailing consumer opinion regarding the most trustworthy companies for privacy. The survey “asked 6,486 adult-aged U.S. consumers which companies did the best job safeguarding personal information,” and Google, which had been ranked on the list for the past three years, dropped from the top 20. American Express retained its spot atop the list this year, closely followed by eBay, IBM, and Amazon. And Facebook made its inaugural appearance on the list at number 15.
Dr. Larry Ponemon, whose eponymous research company co-conducted the study, believes that Google's stature slipped this year because it suffers from “big company syndrome,” he says. "People figure that if you're big and collecting data, there must be an issue.” The overall sentiment among those surveyed is that privacy is a bigger concern than ever, with just 45% of respondents believing they have control over their personal information (down from 48% in 2007 and 56% in 2006).
Facebook likely eclipsed Google in public appeal regarding security due to the dozens of personal modifications available for users on their site. Google seeks to make freely available as much information as possible, and the increase in public awareness regarding identity theft may have contributed to its omission from the top 20.
"Naturally, we're disappointed that we're no longer in the top 20 of the list. Nevertheless, our users' privacy concerns continue to be crucial to our operations, and we continue to have a firm commitment to being transparent about our approach to privacy and giving users meaningful control," says a Google spokesperson. Yet it seems like the biggest safeguard for users wary of Google's ability (or lack thereof) to protect their privacy would simply be to carefully monitor the content they put online.
Facebook disagrees. "It shouldn't be binary, where you either reveal a piece of data to everyone on the Internet or Facebook or not at all," says Chris Kelly, Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer. "We think people want to share more information, but they want choices."
What does this really mean for Google? Since Google is becoming the world's largest information aggregator and it isn't publicly acknowledged among the most trustworthy companies, should its users be worried?
This week, eBay is getting some positive feedback from Capitol Hill. The online auction giant recently agreed to ban the sales of tickets to President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration ceremony in January, in cooperation with California Senator Dianne Feinstein (D). Sen. Feinstein is drafting legislation to make the scalping a crime, so eBay is putting their foot down on peddling the free tickets (available through your local member of Congress). This comes after some tickets -- which have yet to be distributed -- were selling for as much as $40,000 a pop.
There are only 250,000 tickets to be had, but District and federal officials are expecting up to four million people to descend upon the Mall on that chilly January morning. Since there are sixteen times as many expected viewers as there are available spots, shouldn't ticket "prices" be sixteen times greater? Perhaps it is wrong to exploit such a momentous occasion, one that truly shouldn't have a price tag, but scalping is a staple of public gatherings in this country. While scalpers might be irritable and generally unpleasant people, they are simply playing the numbers: price goes up with demand is much higher than supply. Yet, scalpers aren't allowed to "re-sell" tickets to the Inauguration, because Sen. Feinstein and others believe that the tickets are initially free and should remain so.
So the tickets will officially remain free of charge for all spectators, not just those lucky few (well, few hundred thousand) who managed to call Rep. John or Jane Q. Congressperson on time. But what about scalping in general? Why no outcry from Congress when people are illegally reselling tickets for sporting events or concerts all over the country? If John McCain was elected president (assuming the same number of people were planning on attending the inauguration), would Sen. Feinstein have put the kibosh on eBay aiding scalpers? Methinks not. Though her actions were noble, it seems like this decision sets an uneasy precedent for the US government to intervene in the Invisible Hands that govern e-commerce.
Or, perhaps, the US will never see this much interest in an inauguration ever again. In that case, problem solved. What do you think?
Mark Cuban, occasional bad-boy owner of the Dallas Mavericks and dot-com billionaire, has been indicted accused of insider training by the SEC. The charges, filed today in Texas federal court, allege that Cuban sold his shares of Mamma.com after receiving classified information from the company's CEO about an upcoming IPO. The SEC says that "despite agreeing in June 2004 to keep material, non-public information about an impending stock offering by Mamma.com Inc. confidential, Cuban sold his entire stack in the company - 600,000 shraes - prior to the public announcement of the offering. By selling when he did, Cuban avoided losses in excess of $750,000."
The SEC indictment allegations (which can be found here) recount all the sordid, shady details behind the story. True to form, Cuban's actions portray him as a rich kid who whines when he doesn't get his way. After being told that he would lose money in the IPO, Cuban wisely retorted, "Well, now I'm screwed. I can't sell." The CEO of Mamma described Cuban as having "flew off the handle" at the news, and I can't blame the guy for getting a little testy. After all, he'd be losing a lot of money, right?
But wait - Cuban is already worth upwards of $2.8 billion. The man is astronomically wealthy. For those of you counting, it would take about 25 Mark Cubans to bail out the US banking system. So what does a measly little $750,000 mean to him? Apparently, a lot. Cuban is a ruthless businessman, but his persona has two sides. There's the cold, calculating man who takes big risks and gets big payoffs, and then there's the impulsive little kid who isn't afraid to speak (or yell) his mind and frequently gets in trouble. Cuban's been fined over $1.6 million for 13 separate incidents of berating or publicly criticizing NBA referees. Cuban's illegal sale of the Mamma shares wasn't about the money - it was about being swindled, about having the rug swept out from under him.
The guy's used to getting what he wants, but this time he didn't. He reacted impulsively and will pay the price. But don't expect this to be the last time Mark Cuban gets in trouble.
ClearContext is a software company that makes email more useful. Here founder and CEO, Deva Hazarika, talks to Robert Scoble about why email is so hated inside corporations and how people can dramatically make it easier to deal with.
"Mad Money" host Jim Cramer, that chrome-domed hero of trashy TV addicts and armchair-finance junkies alike, has fallen on hard times. He appeared on “The Today Show” on October 6th, imploring viewers: "Whatever money you may need for the next five years, please take it out of the stock market. Right now." To say this statement fanned the flames of the Wall Street crisis is an understatement. A more apt analogy would be to say that Cramer dumped rocket fuel on a tire fire. The subsequent torrent of criticism which rained upon Cramer provided an excellent lesson in personal branding: stick to what you're good at.
In Cramer's case, he's very good at pointing at the camera, hitting buttons, and yelling "Booyah!" It makes for great TV; in fact, since the meltdown kicked into high gear, the "Mad Money” viewership has nearly doubled. What Jim Cramer is not good at is reliably predicting the stock market. He has a long, distinguished history of making terrible calls, defying even coin-flip odds of making money with stocks. In 2006, Cramer's aggregate recommendations actually lost money, "despite nearly every major equity market on earth being up between about 15 percent and 30 percent" (according to convicted felon/securities fraud expert Henry Blodget). Earlier this year, he told viewers to hold on to Bear Stearns stock -- actual quote: "No, no, no! Bear Stearns is fine!" A week later, Bear Stearns had sold itself to JPMorgan at $2 a share, after trading at prices more almost 100 times greater mere months before.
So Cramer has a history of being wrong. That's indisputable. But Cramer isn't on cable TV because he's a financial genius. If that were the case, he wouldn't need to scream for an hour on CNBC every night. Cramer's on TV because he makes for great TV - a brash, energetic, personable Wall Street insider who can get people to believe what he says. If Cramer were able to consistently make market calls that made all of his viewers filthy stinking rich, he'd average more than about 220,000 people per night. People watch Cramer because they enjoy stylish and savvy amusement, and the man delivers.
That's what Cramer neglected to remember on ”The Today Show.”. He can get away with making foolhardy and knee-jerk claims on CNBC, but not so much on national TV during a time when the country is looking for financial gurus for sage and rational advice. Cramer insists that his "five year" comment is "one of the best calls of [his] life." But not a week later, Warren Buffett humbly asked the American investing public to buy American stocks, because that's precisely what he's doing. Who's more credible? Buffett, naturally. This country already trusts the Berkshire Hathaway billionaire to dispense with such an admonition. Cramer would be wise to remember that at the end of the day he's just a smart guy with a shtick. He should shtick to doing just that.
An era has ended in the Bronx. Sometime next year, “The House That Ruth Built” will become “The House That P.J. Graziano and Sons Wrecking Crew Meticulously Disassembled For Resale,” and the old Yankee Stadium will be no more. But nobody in the team's management is too broken up about it - after all, the Yanks stand to make about $50 million from selling off parts of the Stadium to the highest bidders. Who wouldn't want to "own a piece of history?" Pairs of seats are being sold for almost $2,000. Dirt from the field is being sold in fairly novel ways, as mounted and framed pinches of dirt range from $20 to $150. Even the urinals are up for grabs. The new stadium retains the old moniker, and is designed to look like the original 1923 edifice that defined a generation of the game. But the Yankees have hijacked baseball's most lucrative asset - nostalgia - in an attempt to wrest every last cent out of the loyal fan base.
You see, the New York Yankees decided that its 85-year-old Stadium - counted among the most famous and venerated sports grounds in the world – wasn't competitive enough in today's baseball world. Not in the athletic sense of the word, of course. The Yankees have won 26 World Series rings while at the Stadium. Rather, owner George Steinbrenner ruled that the old park wasn't financially competitive enough for the Bronx Bombers. The New Yankee Stadium is estimated to bring in an additional $100 million (!) in ticket sales alone, since the bulk of the seats at the new park have been moved to the pricier lower bowl in contrast to the old park's gargantuan upper deck. The cheap bleacher seats have been reduced in number threefold. There's an oyster and martini bar, as well as a restaurant in center field. Oh, and did I mention that the best seats in the house go for $2,500 per game?
The Yankees can get away with charging that amount for seats mostly because there are lots of really, really rich fans in the NYC area with $150k burning holes in their pockets. But the real issue is how the Yankees have conflated history with shameless commercialism. Baseball, above all other professional sports, is inextricably linked to its past – the game itself simply provides for such a platform. It is heavily based on statistical analysis, which facilitates easy comparison with performances of players long gone. It is a game unencumbered with arbitrary timing; there are no shot clocks or timeouts or two-minute warnings or halftimes, and its pastoral pace is a relic of an era when things moved at a much more thoughtful and leisurely tempo. But perhaps the most important historical link between past and present in baseball are its ballparks.
In the 20th century, the majority of baseball clubs played in the same park for more than 50 years. These are the places where parents took their children to see the greats, and places where the kids expected to take their own young one day. Chief among them was Yankee Stadium, baseball’s Vatican, one of the Big Three remaining from the game’s golden era. Now only Chicago’s Wrigley Field and Fenway Park in Boston remain, and those two teams will sell out every game until their parks disintegrate. Their fans know that they’re seeing the same game as their grandfather saw 80 years ago, and that’s something the Yankees are patronizingly trying to tell season ticket holders of the New Yankee Stadium. You simply can't manufacture or sell a sense of history. It has to be organically grown. But the Yankees have no problem peddling the idea that you can somehow buy a piece of timeless Americana - or your childhood - for a "reasonable" price. That's just false advertising. It's retail fraud.
Yankees fans will smell the pungent scents of wet paint and drying concrete instead of hotdogs and beer next year. But that's just how things work in today's baseball economy. The new park is expensive, but at least the memories of the old one are still free.
The controversial issues surrounding the Beijing Olympics have received more coverage than Jerry Rice in the backfield. The damage is done – the falsified passports, the oppressive smog, and enough overdubbing and fake performances to make Milli Vanilli blush. The annals of history will note that the game-changing performances of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt will feature right alongside the controversial events in the Beijing Games, leaving a legacy of a sideshow rather than the historic athletic occasion it should have been.
The truth is that people simply don’t trust what is presented to them anymore in sports. Steroids, the Chinese government, swimsuits from the future – all of these things contribute to a decline of value in the Games. Real accomplishment has lost meaning. Records are now met with skepticism and disinterest in place of awe and applause. The public does not buy into what happens before their eyes as the way we once did, even as recently as Sydney in 2000. (Show me someone who claims they didn’t tear up when Australian runner Cathy Freeman won the 400m final that year and I’ll show you a liar). This year, instead of a Freeman-like humble veteran winning gold we have a brash showboating phenom in Usain Bolt, whose self-promoting antics have been jeered the world over. The Olympics have succumbed to an all too familiar (read: American) culture of narcissism and apathy.
The remedy? It’s located across the pond and four years down the road, in a little town called London. Purists such as myself (perhaps naively) are looking at the British capital – host of the 2012 Summer Games – to restore faith and instill meaning back to the Olympics. London is the absolute antithesis of Beijing – old-world yet modern, a cultural melting pot (over 250 languages present), and perhaps most importantly, completely subject to the desires of its residents. If the British government forcibly evicted 1.5 million Londoners (as the Chinese have done in Beijing), there would be worldwide outrage and a bloody coup to boot (one would hope). Great Britain is a grade-A democracy, so that means the Olympics will lack two things: first, the Opening Ceremony will not have 20,000 conscripted “volunteers” putting on a beautiful and mesmerizing $100 million display of wasted of money and resources. Secondly, the London Games will not have any inherent scandal. There will be no raised eyebrows about the British government doctoring the passports of its gymnasts. There will be no protests regarding the brutal crackdown of anti-British dissidents. There will be no doubting, no questioning of results.
The storm of controversy surrounding faux-Vietnam War film, Tropic Thunder, emerged late last week when disability advocacy groups began protesting the comedy's portrayal of the intellectually disabled. But the movie's premise, about a group of actors shooting a Vietnam War film – poorly – when the director decides to drop the cast into the middle of an actual war in Southeast Asia, capturing it all on film, is not exactly what raised the ire of these advocacy groups. Instead, one of the film's subplots has caused the uproar.
Tugg Speedman (played by Ben Stiller), the film's star, is reeling from a potentially career-ruining starring role in a movie called Simple Jack, in which he played a developmentally challenged guy who talks to animals. In fact, it was supposed to be Speedman’s Oscar-baiting role, given the success of actors like Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, and Sean Penn as mentally challenged characters.
The protesters, which include groups such as the Special Olympics and the Arc of the United States, certainly have a point. Tropic Thunder takes very broad strokes with the brush of crass language, regularly dropping offensive words throughout the movie. The word “retard” is used very liberally, as Simple Jack”figures prominently in Thunder. (Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the film, which comes out today, but I have read a copy of the shooting script). These groups met with producer DreamWorks this past week, and the studio agreed to modify some of the advertising – most notably taking down the site www.simplejack.com. But the studio wouldn't budge an inch on demands that the film be edited, and the original final cut is what hits theaters today.
Sociologists have plenty of data to back up the claim of the protesters; namely, that flagrant and wanton use of these offensive words makes viewers feel more comfortable using them. But to focus on one offensive epithet in this film is to selectively ignore two things. First, the film is so rife with offensive conceits that absolutely anything in the movie must be taken with a grain of crude, hilarious salt. Prime example: Robert Downey Jr. plays a famous fictional Australian method actor who is cast as an African-American; thus, in order to fully immerse himself in the role, he undergoes skin pigmentation treatment to turn himself black. If that isn’t offensive on paper, then I don’t know what is.
Secondly, the film isn’t really about race relations or the Vietnam War at all. It’s a hilarious, painfully accurate lampoon of the ridiculous Hollywood system that encourages actors to take on roles portraying the mentally disabled, or change one’s race (e.g. Al Pacino in “Scarface,” all of the Sharks in “West Side Story,” etc.), or even film a war movie in the middle of an actual war. The context in which the “retard” usage appears pokes fun not at the disabled, but at the actors and the film industry as a whole. The studio realized that this film gives it a chance to laugh at itself. They definitely made the right decision.
