Super Bowl 50 advertising winners and losers

Pre-game views. Given the huge cost to air Super Bowl ads, most companies release them ahead of time.

(Audi via AP). This image provided by Audi shows a scene from the company’s “The Commander” spot for Super Bowl 50.

In Audi’s spot, a depressed aging astronaut is reminded of his joy for life by driving an Audi sports auto with his son to David Bowie’s “Starman”. The numbers associated with the off-field action – the commercials – are equally important, especially to the marketers that spend up to $5 million for 30 seconds of air time.

The ad came across as “weird”, said Jim Joseph, chief integrated marketing officer at communications and public relations agency Cohn & Wolfe.

In perhaps the most visually jarring commercial, for Mountain Dew Kickstart, a creature the brand calls a “puppymonkeybaby” — diaper-clad baby bottom, monkey torso, dog head — shakes a rattle, gyrates and rhythmically chants before handing out beverages.

Travis Braun produced a commercial which is now in the top 3 for the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl challenge. The ad features the new Audi R8 V10. Another Budweiser ad featuring the actress Helen Mirren urged people not to drive drunk. “In commercials, you want to entertain and you want to promote your product”, said Steve Ford, of Steve Ford Music, who has been making ads for more than 30 years.

There were a couple of misfires.

Super Bowl regular, Doritos, again provided one of the standouts, and a bizarre/cute Heinz ad was trending on Twitter. One promoted an anti-diarrhea medication Xifaxan and showed a small-intestines mascot trying to watch a football game. Another sought to raise awareness about “opioid-induced constipation”. When the mother throws away a bag of Doritos, the fetus seems to zoom after it, to the consternation of all present.

What doesn’t – Maybe you can claim that the whole trenchcoat bit is a little exhausted, but we’re not sure what else there is to criticize here! This image provided by Mountain Dew shows a “Puppymonkeybaby” in a scene from the company’s Kickstart spot for Super Bowl 50. But he’s rebounded with a Super Bowl commercial that features him “admitting” a different mistake: alleging Verizon used old data to misrepresent T-Mobile.

We said earlier on Super Bowl Sunday that Doritos had one of our favorite ads over the course of Super Bowl Sunday courtesy of an ultrasound gone terribly awry, but we also need to add in here something else we consider rather brilliant: Watching some dogs do nearly everything that they can in order to ensure that they can buy some chips!

“I thought it was hysterical, we all cracked up”, Kearney said.

Capitalizing on election year buzz, Bud Light enlisted Amy Schumer and Seth Rogan to canvass America to promote “The Bud Light Party”. And the outdoor goods-and-clothing company Marmot showed a man palling around with an actual marmot he appears to be falling for, all to illustrate falling in love with the outdoors. But since the financial meltdown of the late 2000s involved the collapse of a housing market filled with too many questionable mortgages, the spot also has an uncomfortable resonance. Six advertised in the big game, including including SunTrust Banks, PayPal, Quicken Loans, Intuit brand and Intuit’s TurboTax and Social Finance Inc. TurboTax, for instance, enlisted Anthony Hopkins to get out the message that you can file your taxes for free with TurboTax. But eagle-eyed, pop culture-savvy fans could recognize three of the actors playing bank robbers – Chris Bauer, Pablo Schreiber and James Ransone – as the guys who played members of the dock-working Sobotka family in the second season of HBO’s classic crime drama The Wire. LG enlisted Liam Neeson in a futuristic spot showing off LG’s new OLED 4K TV. For its Genesis sedan, an ad with comic Kevin Hart following his daughter on a date highlighted the “car finder” tracking feature; the Elantra’s remote start was featured in a spot with campers chased by bears.