Hyundai Spots Take The Poll Position As Humor Returns To The Super Bowl

Hyundai was in top gear for the Super Bowl, speeding away with top honors in USA Today’s Ad Meter competition for its spot featuring comedian Kevin Hart as an overprotective dad who gives the keys of his new car to a young man taking his daughter out on a “First Date.” He then stalks their every move with the Car Finder app installed in the Genesis and on his smart watch. 

Another Hyundai spot touting the automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection safety features on the Elantra — not to mention actor Ryan Reynolds as every male face in a town named “Ryanville” — was fifth in the Ad Meter polls and also in the Top 10 compiled for Vogue by Patricia Garcia. Her commentary on the :44 is simply: “Is there ever such a thing as too much Ryan Reynolds?”

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Did social media skew the results? 

“In one of his Facebook posts, Hart encouraged his fans to head to the Ad Meter site to vote on the first date-themed ad,” USA Today’s Chris Woodyard reveals in his re-cap of the voting. “Reynolds, who has more than one million Twitter followers, sent a link to his ad when it became public.” 

However, a third spot, “Chase,” leads the pack in the McKee Wallwork + Co. annual Adbowl, Marketing Daily’s Sarah Mahoney reports, even without any famous names to tweet about it. Meanwhile, be sure to check out Mahoney’s conversation with agency president Steve McKee, who makes it clear that this year’s Bud executions weren’t for him. 

Budweiser “doubled down by mocking craft beer again,” the hed over Brad Tuttle’s assessment for Moneytells us. “The goal seems to be making Budweiser drinkers feel OK, perhaps even proud, that they are Budweiser drinkers. They aren’t trendy. They aren’t soft or small, or fruity. And apparently, they feel so insecure that they need for Budweiser to point all of this out.”

Overall, the commercial mood was a lot more jovial than last year, in fact, when the commercials were deemed so serious that many thought the game was uncharacteristically more entertaining than the sales pitches. 

The Chicago Tribune’s Steve Johnson was among those who gave a Heinz spot an A+ and No. 1 ranking. It features “a horde of Dachshunds dressed as hot dogs (wiener dogs, naturally) running in slow motion across a field toward a handful of humans in Heinz condiment suits,” he writes. “The perfect musical backdrop is Harry Nilsson’s (‘I can’t live if living is…’) ‘Without You.’”

The Washington Post’s Maura Judkis thought it was “a real weiner, too.”

But the New Yorker’s Ian Crouch prefers another bunch of canines in costume, albeit in a backhanded slap at the whole lineup of spots. “When the funniest image of the night is three dogs hiding under a trench coat to buy Doritos, that’s not great,” he writes.

Another fan favorite is a Doritos spot from Australia that’s not without controversy. “Ultrasound” shows “a pregnant woman getting an ultrasound while her husband munches on some Doritos — and things only get weirder from there,” writes Kristina Monllos for Adweek.

Indeed, the :30 “drew mixed reactions from Twitter users — some of whom thought it was gross, some of whom thought it was funny and some of whom thought it was sort of gross-funny,” writes Sara Boboltz for Huffington Post. “Whatever your take, this is a mental image we won't be able to easily shake the next time we eat Doritos.”

Nonetheless, an ongoing poll on Today.com has the Doritos spot at the No. 1 favorite by far this morning (3,309 votes) over No. 2, “Super Bowl Babies.”

The latter spot for the National Football League itself is set to the music of Seal's “Kissed By A Rose,” and shows “babies, children and adults who have one thing in common: They were all born nine months after their parents' home team won the Super Bowl,” write Jamie Yuccas And Suvro Banerji for CBS News.

On the Media Post #MPSB50 Twitter thread last night, Barbara Lippert observed, “Great NFL work. Great use of babies and kids, for the ‘family.’ Like political ads. Hillary team should take note.”

Also notable was Broncos’ QB Peyton Manning’s post-game shilling for Budweiser. Some people have suggested that he may have received compensation for answering questions about his rumored retirement in two post-game interviews by saying he was going to kiss his wife, hug his family and drink a lot of beer, Budweiser beer. Nah. That was for the love of it, right?

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