It's the Friday evening before Super Bowl, which means my brain is officially pudding. So instead of bringing you up to speed on all the real news around Big Game ads, I'm going to focus on the weirder tidbits. (But don't worry, you can get all the actual updates here.)
First up is one of the oddest things I've seen in 15 years of covering Super Bowl ads: Two spots in Sunday's game bought the exact same piece of stock video, and both forgot to buy exclusive usage rights. A classic "pennywise and pound-foolish" approach, this oversight led to some avoidable embarrassment.
Popeyes even got in on the mockery, creating its own attempt at an unofficial Big Game ad by dropping the same footage into a chicken sandwich video on Twitter.
In other Super Bowl ad weirdness, we decided to have some fun with the USA Today Ad Meter's Top 10 highest-rated ads of all time.
My colleague Patrick Kulp got our AI-powered Super Bowl Bot to revisit each of the 10 classic ads and pitch its own ideas along the same lines.
The results, while sort of believable as Super Bowl ads, are definitely weirder than the originals.
Speaking of Adweek's Super Bowl Bot, for the second year in a row, we had it create a Super Bowl Ad Bingo card, and I created my own without peeking at the bot's ideas. As you can see below, the cards are certainly different, agreeing only on the likelihood that nostalgia will show up in Sunday's spots.
I like my odds on this one. But you never know, Sting might show up to tell us about the lost art of letter writing.
Regardless, I'll see you Sunday night on Adweek.com and all our social channels.
David Griner
International Editor, Adweek
David.Griner@Adweek.com
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