Super Bowl Ads 2010

For the second year in a row, the Super Bowl ads scored lower than the previous year in our annual Super Bowl ad testing that we hosted on our Mediacurves.com website. Understanding why seemed to be intuitive when comparing the 2009 and 2008 ads. The funny entertaining advertisements weren‘t as funny and entertaining in 2009, with the economy and housing markets crashing, as they were in 2008.

However, again in 2010, we saw yet another dip in the ads scores, which may be consistent with the very slow economic recovery. This year, the top five ads scored statistically lower than the top five ads from the previous two years.

The steady decline in ad scores suggests that viewers’ attitudes may have become somewhat jaded as a result of the sluggish economy. In addition, it is quite possible that creative treatments and production values may have been comprised due to budget constraints. The creativity of the ads was not perceived as being as innovative as the previous two years.

The Super Bowl ads seemed like old jokes that were told over and over again until they just weren‘t funny anymore. And, since the content generally ignored what Americans were facing in their day-to-day battle with unemployment, lost assets and life in general, the ads missed the mark with the majority of the viewers. I am not sure how low the scores can go before the segment of “Super Watchers” who claim they watch the game for ads stops watching. We‘ll just have to see next year!