It's easy to have an opinion about Super Bowl spots when you have no skin in the game. But it's another thing to produce one that ends up on the "best" lists.
With that in mind, I want to take a moment to pour a little praise on GSD&M for their "Avocados from Mexico" spot.
I like avocados. But now I like Avocados from Mexico because they recognized something funny about avocados, and human nature, and masterfully blended the two into a strong Super Bowl TV spot.
I have no doubt that while it may or may not be the most talked about spot -- a distinction that belongs to Tide, IMHO -- it did a lot of things right and was money well spent by the client.
All things being equal, I'd buy avocados from Mexico because I liked them better as a brand on Monday morning. That's successful branding.
Let's look at their Super Bowl spot. First off, it was about avocados, and a precious supply of them. Secondly, it was about humans being typical whiney human beings. And thirdly, it made me smile and made my wife laugh out loud. It recognized something universal about human nature.
Laddering from a limited supply of avocados to no supply of chips, then to a much larger crisis --the temporary loss of a wifi signal -- wah...wah...wah, was a great comedic sequence.
If you were to ask me what a successful Super Bowl spot looks like, I'd point to this one and a small handful of others. It wasn't trying to create controversy. It didn't put a storyline between the viewer and the product. It didn't appropriate from a MLK speech, drive backwards, or talk "inside baseball" during a football game.
It made avocados and the consumption of them the primary point and told a good joke in the process. Kudos to GSD&M and the client. I took the liberty of posting the :60 but the :30 is just as good. Well done.