Post Super Bowl Commercial Roundup

The world’s best marketing is on display Super Bowl Sunday.  It’s hard for advertisers to get our ADD attention.  Yet once a year marketers are promised a massive audience who are actually excited to see commercials.

Going into tonight, my position bet was with Best Buy.  I thought they would deliver a solid advertising presence.  I found their commercial to be a non-event mostly because I was outside running a charcoal grill in the sub-arctic during its run.  No one mentioned it otherwise.

Samsung crushed the commercial scene.  They ran a funny Super Bowl ad campaign hard on the internet leading up to today and then a late game variation on the idea.  Then they splashed LeBron James in FTW.  Nice use of Saul Goodman too.

Chrysler delivered two solid ads, sticking with the serious tenor that the media machine receives well.  They played the military and the God card.  They want you to cry, they want you talk, then they want you to buy a pickup truck.

Through all the drama and Beyoncé emerged one very clear winner.  They didn’t have to spend a dollar on advertising, although they have plenty of cash on hand.  All they needed was a few thousand inefficient metal halide bulbs to overwhelm the electrical grid.  If only they had lit the stadium with the lights of the future, the LED lights of Cree, we would have had an uninterrupted Super Bowl.

Cree is already a beast this year, up nearly 30% in one short month.  The recent advancements in lighting grade LED technology are a boon for company as adoption rates accelerate.  Infrastructure rhetoric is sure to be on the tongues of our current administration.  How much of this is currently being baked into the stock price of Cree is unclear, but converting more of a city’s infrastructure away from outdated lighting is an insurance policy against fragile electrical grids.

Cree wins.  The babies from space had me for a minute, then it was Kia.

Bonus points to the Iron Man trailer, showing Air Force One blowing into pieces only seconds after the shocking power outage which my jaded mind instantly thought could be a terrorist attack.  Strange times we live in.