NOTICE TO READERS AND FRIENDS

I have decided to cancel the Super Bowl Ad Review.

We had been doing this for the past six or seven years, I don't exactly know how long and I'm not that willing to go back through my posts to find out. But frankly, it's run its course and I am unwilling to put in the effort to rate these spots ultimately to fail many of them for violating the DO NOT ATTEMPT test.

Given that the first place many see the spots is through social media (YouTube, Twitter, etc.) and many spots are broken just weeks before the game, there just isn't the element of surprise in the creative any more.

Which begs the question: is a Super Bowl spot really worth up to $4 million any more, with all the relatively inexpensive buzz that can be created by social media? The spot is no longer an entity in and of itself, just a small piece of a much larger marketing puzzle. One of the first Super Bowl advertisers to exploit this was GoDaddy, who continued their ads with "unrated bonus content" available on their website. Too bad it almost always turned out to be LAME "unrated bonus content".