Super Bowl 2013: More violent, sexist, ageist ads

Ads during Sunday’s Super Bowl cost an
average of $3.8 million for a 30-second spot, up from last year's $3.5 million.

The 2013 offerings, like last year, showed scantily clad women and people being
slapped and knocked down.

Adding to the violence of the ads and the
game of football itself were ads for movies, such as “Ironman 3,” and TV shows, such
as “How I Met Your Mother,” which showed hitting, punching, slapping, and
explosions.

At halftime, Beyoncé wore a skimpy costume,
as did the couple of dozen of women who performed with her. Then she writhed
around on the floor of the stage. The performance added to the sexist
atmosphere of the Super Bowl.

I did like one
ad: Dodge, in advertising its Ram
pickup, offered an ad about the importance of farmers, narrated by Paul Harvey.

Here are my awards for the worst ads airing
during this year’s Super Bowl:

Unnecessary violence:

Two guys in a library whisper,
then fight about what’s best in an Oreo cookie, the cookie or the cream.
The fight spreads throughout the entire library, and the police drive through
the wall to break up the fights.

In an ad for SABMiller Redd’s Apple Ale, a guy
can’t decide what to order, so an apple is thrown at him, knocking him down.
Then he knows he should order Redd’s Apple Ale.

In Audi’s
ad, a teen gets the keys to the Audi to drive to the prom. He marches in and
steals a kiss from the queen and gets punched by the king.

Silliest:

Budweiser’s ad, with the man who
trained a Clydesdale that later broke away from his team of horses during a
Chicago parade to hunt the man down, ranks as silly, in my opinion.

Also silly was Tide’s ad
featuring a salsa stain on a shirt that looked like a football player. Dozens of people came to look at the “miracle,” with the man’s wife
washing the shirt and saying “Go, Ravens.”

A man who loves Doritos
buys a goat who loves them, too. By the end of the ad after the goat has eaten
hundreds of packages of the chips, the guy’s hoarding them and making a
for-sale sign for the goat.

Stretchers, a tennis shoe, shows a man
outrunning a cheetah and tying him up, thus saving an antelope.

Most sexist:  

Last year, Go Daddy.com showed two guys
in the “cloud” populated with scantily clad women. This year, it grossed out a
lot of people by showing a sexy model kissing a nerd with awful sloppy sounding
kissing.

In another Go Daddy.com ad, also sexist, wives around the world are harping to
their husbands for not putting their big idea online.

Fiat’s ad slowly panned over a woman lying on the
beach in a bikini was bad enough, but having a scorpion crawl over her? Yuck.
Then, when she sees the car, she stands up and throws off her bikini top. The
scorpion drags it away.

Motorola's cell phone ad features actress Megan Fox in
a bathtub. Two men slap each other and another falls off a ladder looking at
the phone.

A Doritos
ad shows a little girl bribing her dad to play her with a bag of chips. He
dresses up and puts on makeup, as do four of his friends.

Gliden, t-shirt maker, produced an ad showing a man
trying to sneak out after a one-night stand, which included fuzzy handcuffs,
only the woman is sleeping in his favorite t-shirt.

Century 21’s ads don’t show women in a good light either.
A woman is so taken with her new wealth that she doesn’t see that her husband is
choking, a woman in labor demands a new kitchen, and a mother-in-law is so
awful that a groom faints at the altar when he thinks about living with her.

Calvin
Klein’s ad showed a male model in
nothing but underwear for most of the ad. Objectifying men isn’t any better than
objectifying women.

Best Buy’s ad showed Amy Poehler asking dozens of
questions, and making suggestive comments to the sales associate.

In a Coke
ad, a bus full of chorus girls chases toward a giant bottle of Coke, with other
characters. One of the girls shoots a cannon full of something that sounds bad
but floats down lightly at the cowboys. And, a biker, gets thrown up on the
window of the bus.

Kia’s scantily clad women “robots” put this ad in
the sexist category. One of the robots kicked a man, earning it violent points,
too.

While SodaStream
made environmental points showing its machine that carbonates beverages, thus
avoiding using cans and bottles, it wasn’t necessary to have a woman in a
bikini operate the machine.

Most irritating:

Since there
isn’t any drama when you buy a car from Cars.com,
for the commercial, the sales representative gives the two consumers a wolf
cub, then the jealous wolf-mom walks in. Ha, ha.

In an ad for
milk, The Rock races out to the
street in his pajamas to pick up milk. He dodges bank robbers, angry lions, and
traffic jams and ignores a kitten stuck in a tree.

Ageist:

In the Taco Bell ad, a group of seniors leave
the retirement home for a night on the town. While some people thought their
partying was funny, I thought it made older people look ridiculous.

Racist:

In a Volkswagen ad, a white man’s car makes
him so happy he speaks with a Jamaican accent. When the ad was released early,
many people wondered if it was racist.

Dark and creepy:

Anheuser-Busch
announced its new beer, Budweiser Black Crown, with two ads that were dark and
creepy, featuring young, upscale people in dark clothing.

Bud Lite’s ads featured characters
trying to get luck through voodoo. One man carried his living room chair to the
voodoo master, Stevie Wonder.

In the Mercedes-Benz
ad, an actor is going to sell his soul in exchange for a new Mercedes CLA as
well as a rich lifestyle, which includes dating Kate Upton and dancing with
Usher. However, the actor sees on a billboard stating that the price starts
under $30,000, so he saves himself.

For other opinions on the ads, see The
Washington Post article, “The Five Worst Super Bowl Commercials of 2013” and
ABC’s “The Six Worst, or Most Talked About Super Bowl Ads This Year.”