TVSquad

Invented a new product that you'd like to pitch to millions of sports fans? Think you could pack all your thoughts into one second? Got a hundred thousand dollars kicking around?

Didn't think so.

According to Reuters, NBC (they're airing Super Bowl XLIII in Jan. '09) is expected to announce that the starting rate for a 30-second spot during the big game will be $3 million. Wow. That factors out to a hundred grand per second. Last year's going rate was a mere $2.7 million.

While I'm sure this comes as no surprise (I mean, c'mon - the rates jump every year, don't they?) to the big companies known for their Super Bowl commercials (think Budweiser, Coke, Pepsi, Fed Ex, etc.), it still makes you wonder how some of these smaller random companies can afford it. Every year there's some new Internet start-up you've never heard of and they'll end up having one of the most talked about commercials - like GoDaddy.com from a few years ago. It just seems like a real gamble. Rather than put all of your footballs in one field (eggs in a basket, get it?), I would think that spreading your money over numerous smaller ad campaigns would make more sense.

TV commercials are fairly easy to satirize. If you think about it, advertising is sort of ridiculous in the first place (a TV show is interrupted to ask you to buy toilet paper and gum?), so they're a natural for parody. There have been a lot of great parodies over the years, from shows such as Saturday Night Live and SCTV, and now Nerve has picked the 50 that they consider to be the best.

There are a lot of great choices, from SNL's "Colon Blow," "Schmitt's Gay Beer," and "Compulsion by Calvin Klein" to the Zoloft ad from Mad TV. One of my favorites is SNL's "Happy Fun Ball" spot, which was written by Jack Handey and included in his new book of essays What I'd Say To The Martians. It's a good list all around, though it's also one that I feel is missing a bunch of good ones, only I can't put my finger on which ones are missing at the moment.

The one they pick as number one is undoubtedly a classic, though I think it's overrated. I've always loved the one after the jump.

Television ads aren't fun anymore. There's a sameness to them: the fast edits, the young bodies, the deep-voiced announcers who all sound alike. And, with the advent of TiVo and the DVR, most of them are just a blur to us as we fast-forward from the end of one scene to the beginning of another. You would have to go all the way back to the days just around the advent of the personal VCR to find entertaining commercials that featured characters and slogans that would stick in your brain.

Rebbecca Brown just went back to the '70s. By culling the parents' garage known as the Internet, Brown was able to put together 10 memorable ads from the decade of Watergate, leisure suits and the 8-track cassette. If you were around during that decade you will remember most, if not all, of the ads that Brown picked.

Ahhh, the weekend. A glorious time when the prospect of burning some daylight watching sit-com stars from the 80s rap seems perfectly reasonable. Especially if it's so frickin' cold it's snowing outside. Seriously, why am I getting snowed on in April?

Anyway, one of my friends sent along a link to a post by Benner on a blog called Touch. It features videos of a bunch of old commercials that use rap to try and sell you on one thing or another. You have the classic: D.J. Fred and M.C. Barney for Fruity Pebbles, the strange: Jennifer Love Hewitt in a commercial for bread, and the cringe-worthy: Larry Bird raps for Converse. Finally, there's the awesome: a promo for ABC Wednesday featuring the casts of Perfect Strangers and Head Of The Class. That one is embedded after the jump. Follow the read link for Benner's post and the rest of the videos.

Advertising is everywhere on TV and online, and not merely in the form of traditional commercials. Most of us are used to viewing ads before watching online videos, and product placement can even be humorous if done properly (30 Rock does it particularly well). Can the partnership between advertising and entertainment go too far, though?

NBC Universal is joining forces with an advertising agency on a new venture: product-centered programming. The network's Digital Studio will work with the Omnicom Group to create several series that focus on the products of participating sponsors. These programs will air on NBC's "digital properties" (websites, for example.).

Let's talk about cereal commercials (again).

I thought of all of the cereal commercials we've had over the years after seeing the latest ads for Fiber One. Yes, to answer your question, that is Kate and Allie's Fred Koehler playing the store clerk who calls the manager over after the customer has a question about the lack of twigs in his cereal (that's Koehler with Johnathon Schaech). At first I thought to myself, "why is he doing cereal commercials instead of TV shows and movies?," but then I figured, hey, we all have to pay the bills, and Fiber One cereal is good! I just saw a sequel to the ad that features new Fiber One/Yoplait Yogurt and in it you see Kathryn Joosten, a great actress who played Mrs. Landingham on The West Wing and Mrs. McCluskey on Desperate Housewives and...well, a million other roles. So it's actually very cool to see them doing this stuff along with their many other roles.

Did you know that baseball players are big-time soap opera fans? It's true. All that time they spend hanging out in the clubhouse during the day, they have the soaps playing in the background. Not all, but a lot. That said, it'll be interesting to see if the same things that sell soaps -- the drama, the relationships, the never-ending stories -- work for ESPN in selling their Fantasy Baseball League. They're calling the series of commercials "Endless Drama."

Two items of interest this week...

Warner Brothers Animation is confirming that this will be the last season for the Legion of Super Heroes, as production has halted for the Kids WB! series. There will be three more episodes of the series, with two of them being part of the series finale that will air sometime later this year. Replacing this series, on someplace other than Kids WB!, which ends its run this season, will be a new program entitled Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Whether this show will replace the current The Batman series, or where this show will air, has yet to be determined.

I don't understand why certain commercials get to become "banned." I've seen a few since the latest multitude of Super Bowl commercials, and most of those have been funnier that anything shown on TV! Who the heck decided these commercials weren't fit for television? There were even a couple of questionable ones shown during the game this year, ones that offended quite a few people. Who cleared those monstrosities?

Case in point, the following "banned" Wendy's commercial, from 2007, for their four-alarm spicy chicken sandwich. The scientist holds said sandwich out to his assistant with tongs, so you know right away this thing means business. I haven't had fast food in years, but I gotta say I started wondering where the nearest Wendy's joint was so I could try one of these bad boys; that fourth "hint" (hit?) of spice is a doozy. Continue on for the video. (And for those who don't get the headline, read up on LOLCats.)

[via Digg]

A new column here at TV Squad, where we talk about all of the things you're missing when you hit fast forward on your DVRs.

This week, I'd like to talk to you about Cheerios.

Specifically, I'd like to talk to you about the Cheerios commercial that has been running for several months. You know it. It's the one where the dad is going to eat Cheerios for six weeks to lower his cholesterol and his son has six weeks to do a report on Shakespeare. I have a question about this particular ad, which seems to be on 33 times a day right now.

Does the dad hate his son?

A new column here at TV Squad, where we talk about all of the things you're missing when you hit fast forward on your DVRs.

I thought I'd kick off the very first Brought To You By...column by talking about yesterday's Super Bowl ads (apparently there was also a game of some sort played...). USA Today did their annual ranking of the best and worst of the ads, having a bunch of viewers watch the ads with meters and give an opinion on the good and the bad, and for some reason Bud got the top spot, the way they do every single year. It must be that the people who vote on these things like horses, wacky comedy, or they're all drunk (on Budweiser). The company got three of the top ten slots, and number one went to the spot where the dog trained the horse, accompanied by the Rocky theme. It's bad enough that Bud seems to win over viewers every year, but this dog/horse ad wasn't even the best of the Bud ads yesterday!

Anyway, I have my own thoughts on the best and worst, and I'll list them after the jump.

Super Bowl XLII is all done except for the cleanup and the hangovers. And, you are probably doing one of two things right now. Either you are joyously celebrating the win of the Wild Card New York Giants over the undefeated (until Sunday) New England Patriots, or your are cursing out that f@#&ing Tom Brady and coach Bill Belichick for screwing up a perfect season and, most likely, starting a new sports curse in New England.

Oh well, at least you have the commercials to take your mind off of it all if you were a Patriots fan. This year's crop was pretty diverse with a mix of serious and humorous ads. Plus, a little star power thrown in just for taste. Thanks to Jason Hughes, Jen Creer, JJ Hawkins, and yours truly, TV Squad has postings about every new commercial that aired, from the E-Trade baby to the guy who attached jumper cables to his nipples.

If you're scratching your head on what the hell I mean then jump over to the next page, where you'll see a list of links to all of our commercial reviews.

Cracked.com has a put together a list of five commercials that companies would really like you to forget. The commercials, mostly from the 1960s, speak to a much different time in American history. They show just how unevolved mainstream America's views of race and gender were.

My two favorites (although I'm unsure whether "favorite" is the appropriate word) were the Folgers commercial where all the husband wants for his birthday is for his wife to make a decent cup of coffee and the Jell-O commercial. This ad features a Chinese baby (pictured at the right) who can't eat the "Western delicacy" with his chopsticks.

Cracked.com has videos for all the commercials so go and have a look.

Like last year, we'll be reviewing all of the commercials during the Super Bowl today, complete with embedded videos of each one. Check back to the site often for the latest additions, or check back later for a summary of links to all of the commercials we covered.

Also check out AOL Sports' coverage of the game.

Shocking Public Service Announcements (PSA) are common in Canada. For example, a few years ago in Quebec, we had a TV ad that contained real footage shot during a daring car stunt that went terribly wrong (the teenage driver died while doing the stunt) so that teens would be "scared straight" by seeing how stupid and deadly reckless driving can be.

The latest shocking PSA TV ad campaign comes from Ontario and is called "Prevent It." These PSAs, which have been airing for a while now, feature shocking and gruesome scenes showing what can happen at work if you don't ensure safety is everyone's primary concern.