Good, bad and weird night for TV commercials

It was a Jekyll-and-Hyde Super Bowl for both the Seahawks and TV commercials. The night was dark and the decisions were suspect.

I will leave the refereeing and penalties to dissection elsewhere. Fans convinced of bias can blog about weeks of pro-Steelers media coverage or the starring role assigned via microphone to Pittsburgh's Jerome Bettis throughout the game.

But Super Bowl XL's weird mix of ads — a watery broth with an occasional piece of meat or maggot in it — suggests Madison Avenue has problems no amount of Internet razzle-dazzle can cure.

There were some flares of brilliance. The Burger King spot featuring a showgirl chorus line of Whopperettes dressed as hamburger components was surreal and memorable. Budweiser's aw-shucks ad with a young Clydesdale straining at the beer-wagon harness while a grownup horse secretly pushes was anthropomorphism at its finest.

Too often, however, commercials aimed at the general public were bland and anxious-to-please. Those targeting a particular group, such as teenage girls or men under 30, felt clumsy and obvious. The result was a strange evening of mood swings.

Part of the problem is the advertising industry had to please too many masters: the FCC, the NFL, ABC and A.C. Nielsen. The nipple effect of 2004 has caused valid fear of indecency fines. The NFL is notoriously protective of its image, and Disney-owned ABC is among the most family-conscious networks.

And the effort by marketers to simultaneously reach a broad, 90-million-plus Super Bowl audience while appealing to slices of the demographic pie can result in dissonance.

Even so, misjudgments abounded. Having forgone sex, some marketers seemed to think the only enticement left for young male viewers was violence. A number of ads had Three Stooges-like conclusions in which a character was physically assaulted.

In a FedEx spot, a prehistoric office worker has his package intercepted by a pterodactyl. After his unsympathetic boss won't listen ("But FedEx doesn't exist yet!" "Not my problem."), the worker steps outside and is squashed by a mastodon.

A camper in a Budweiser ad uses his beer to pacify a bear — until his roommate snags the beer and the camper subsequently is mauled. An otherwise amusing Bud spot with husbands pretending to perform rooftop errands like cleaning the gutter in order to drink beer ends with one of the men falling through the roof.

I guess it wouldn't matter so much if these endings added to the commercial. But they usually felt like substitutes for good writing — a punch instead of a punch line, a kick rather than a kicker.

An example of a spot for younger men that worked beautifully without whaps on the head was Budweiser's revolving-fridge spot, which carried a perfectly timed revelation of how one man's worldly stash is another man's manna from heaven.

A common Super Bowl ad trend is the celebrity spot, and a common failing of it is the tendency to rely on the star's appearance alone.

That happened with an Aleve spot that tacked on Leonard Nimoy's Vulcan salute and in Pepsi's spots featuring Jay Mohr as an agent negotiating on behalf of a Pepsi can with stars like Sean Combs and Jackie Chan. Neither "story" went anywhere, and Pepsi also broke a cardinal marketing rule by drawing attention to competitor Coca-Cola.

On the other hand, ABC's promos for "Desperate Housewives" were a great example of how to use stars by juxtaposing your assumptions about them against what they're really like. So it was that a series of macho men revealed their passion for Wisteria Lane.

What else worked?

Humor, including Nationwide Insurance's Fabio-as-a-geezer spot. Ameriquest's "Don't Judge Too Quickly" tagline went nicely with a scenario in which a doctor uses a defibrillator to kill a fly and says "I killed him" — just as a patient's family walks in.

I also liked the monsters-in-love Hummer ad, and a visually enthralling MotoPEBL phone spot with lovely, hallucinatory images.

In other words, a little of this and a little of that. No trend dominated, and that's perhaps the good news. It leaves open hope that advertisers will get back to thinking hard about how to sway people emotionally.

Meanwhile, and in lieu of serving up memorable spots, the industry will carpet-bomb us by putting them on sites like espn.com, yahoo.com and nfl.com — as well as Comcast On Demand, Sprint cellphones and a link to your roommate's mother's Web site. If you missed Super Bowl XL, you can still get Super Bowl X-cess.

A few years back, advertising rose to an art form rivaling the entertainment that surrounded it. Now, a tipping point has been reached in which the allure of new technology threatens to substitute saturation for imagination.

Speaking of X-cess, all one can say about the Rolling Stones' halftime show was they tried. And they tried. And they tried. And they tried. But "Satisfaction" ain't what it used to be, whether it's Super Bowl ads or the bad boys of rock.

Kay McFadden: kmcfadden@seattletimes.com