Best of, 2013 Super Bowl Commercials

Yes, the Niners lost and it's cause for all of us San Franciscan natives to be upset for days, but their 5 minutes of post-power outage rampage was enough for me.

Unfortunately, streaming the 'bowl live on CBSsports.com came with one serious drawback: terrible ads.  The network sold digital content separately from broadcast, and it was... terrible.   But, working in the ad business, I spent the evening looking through all of the commercials that aired during the Super Bowl.

Here are my two favorites (I know, there aren't enough 'best of' Super Bowl commercial blog posts).

The first is a favorite because of its dumb and simple 'masculine humor.'  Coming from a brand we haven't seen anything from for a long, long time... it was refreshing to see such an entertaining spot.

My second favorite was widely regarded as one of the best... Ram's 'Farmer' commercial.  I don't usually like to jump on bandwagons, but this spot was great.  The stern, authoritative VO really brought the gravity of the message to life.  

Here's a little history on the spot from Huffington Post:

One of the most memorable commercials of the 2013 Super Bowl was Ram Trucks' "Farmer," a simple slideshow of photographs accompanied by a stirring tribute to America's farmers that featured the recurring phrase, "So God made a farmer."

It turns out the scratchy audio in the commercial came from a speech given by radio personality Paul Harvey at the 1978 National Future Farmers of America Convention, an annual meeting held by the National FFA Organization, an agriculture education group founded in 1928.

The Ram commercial begins with a bleak photograph of a single cow in front of a snowy field, and Harvey's voice says, "And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, I need a caretaker. So God made a farmer."

The ad shows Harvey's name in the first frame.

Read the full text of Harvey's 1978 speech here.

###