Super Bowl ads bring lighter tone

From a strange creature called “Puppy-monkeybaby” to a tear-inducing Audi ad, Super Bowl ads ran the gamut this year from offbeat humour to heartfelt messages.

On advertising’s biggest night, Chrysler celebrated Jeep with an ad featuring black-and-white portraits of veterans, kids and pop icons. In Audi’s spot, a depressed ageing astronaut remembers his joy for life by driving an Audi sports car with his son. And in a quirky Doritos ad, a foetus in a sonogram appears to rocket out of the womb to chase a bag of chips the mother angrily tossed away.

The goal for advertisers: to stand out and win over the 114 million-plus people watching the big game on Super Bowl Sunday, much the way the Denver Broncos triumphed over the Carolina Panthers. With ads costing a record $5 million for 30 seconds this year, the stakes are high to stand out from the 40-plus advertisers and be remembered.

In general, advertisers played it safe with universally liked celebrities such as Anthony Hopkins (TurboTax) and Ryan Reynolds (Hyundai), cute animals and pro-America themes. “It’s been a pretty safe night,” said David Berkowitz, chief marketing officer at advertising agency MRY. “There’s relatively little going over the top.”

Offbeat humour reigned with a creature called “Puppymonkeybaby” — pretty much exactly what it sounds like — in an ad for Mountain Dew’s Kickstart. The ad sought to show that three great things go together, since Kickstart combines Mou-ntain Dew, juice and caffeine. “It’s on my list of the weirdest ad of the night, but it’s very catchy and people will be talking about it,” said Kelly O’Keefe, a marketing professor at Virginia Commo-nwealth University.

Heartfelt messages were in abundance too. SunTrust’s ad urged people to take a breath and feel better about their financial health. BMW’s Mini urged people to “defy labels.”

Most ads managed to avoid the sombre tone struck last year, when an ad for Nationwide about preventable household accidents bummed out many in the audience.

There were a couple of misfires. Two pharmaceutical ads highlighted unappealing digestive conditions. One promoted an anti-diarrhoea medication Xifaxan with a small-intestines mascot taking a seat at the Super Bowl. Another sought to raise awareness about “opioid-induced constipation.”

“This just isn’t a topic that people want to hear about during a Super Bowl,” said Villanova University marketing professor Charles Taylor.

Mountain Dew’s ad might have been the weir-dest ad of the night, but Doritos’ ad also seemed likely to divide viewers. The spot showed a couple during a sonogram. When the mother throws away a bag of Doritos, the foetus seems to zoom after it, to the consternation of all present.