As you’ve seen by my last few posts, I took a pretty good look at the Super Bowl ads this year.  In my opinion, most fell short of the mark from past Super Bowls.  There were a few that resonated with me for different reasons.  Volkswagen with the previously mentioned ‘The Force‘ spot, as well as the introduction of the new VW Beetle – cute and well executed spots. I thought Planters did a great job with their stop motion spot entitled ‘Alejandro‘ for their almond line.  I’m biased – it was done here in Portland by Laika/House.  I always love local companies making good on the big stage.

Finally, the spot I thought evoked the most EMOTION in me was by Chrysler – ‘Imported From Detroit‘ (created by Wieden+Kennedy here in PDX).  This is a city and a community that has been kicked in the head repeatedly as we’ve hit the economic downturn.  As one of my co-workers stated, the spot connects and re-connects with almost every line.  For someone that has never been to Detroit, nor really considered it a place I’d be interested in visiting, I had that opinion altered with the cinematography as Slim Shady navigated his Chrysler throughout the city.  Someone else described the ad as an ode to the motor city, with a bit of product placement.  That’s a spot on assessment.  You’ll never see this aired again on broadcast TV in it’s original format – at 2 minutes long, it’s outside the boundaries of a normal 30 second commercial.  It is getting plenty of run on YouTube however, with 4.5M views and counting. Well done Chrysler. Never forget where you came from.

For the first time ever, Mercedes Benz is advertising in the Super Bowl – and doing it in a fashion that is fitting for the times… a full on Social Media blitz, which they’re calling the Mercedes Tweet Race.  This campaign coincides with their 125th anniversary and is compelling if only for the fact they are rolling out some amazing new models.  The grand prize for the individual with the most followers in the Tweet Race?  A brand new, 2012 C-Class Coupe.  Not too shabby… if you have the scratch to pay for the taxes on that prize.

I’m a bit late in writing this post, as the ability to enter the race has closed.  However, if you’d like to learn more and see who’s pulling away – head over to their Facebook page and ‘Like’ the MB Tweet Race tab.

Mercedes is not the only auto manufacturer blitzing the Super Bowl with Ads, as nearly 1/3 of the available 63 spots are car centric, according to Brand Week.  Can’t wait for the commercials… oh yeah – and the actual game itself!

On the Twitter Blog yesterday there is a great chart that compares and contrasts Brand mentions and Super Bowl mentions on Super Sunday.  The winning brand? Doritos – hands down, with the largest per minute volume of commercial related tweets.  This begs the question: During a large event can we use Twitter mentions about brands in conjunction with ratings data to triangulate how many people not only saw, but also took a vested interest in how a brand has affected them during the larger viewing experience?  I believe we can, and I think that you will see the use of this hard data be a complement to institutionalized ratings as brands seek substantiation of audience engagement.

We’ve been out of the mix in terms of being an advertiser in the Super Bowl for more than a decade (12 years to be precise).  This past Sunday, we changed that in a big way – debuting two new ads (Lunch Room and Generations) during the game and again in the post-game show (which we were also the primary sponsor of).  Not only did we have an exciting game to watch, but as an Intel employee it gave me a great sense of pride to see our name on such a grand sporting stage.  The team that I work with did a great job of pulling all of this together – we’ve all been working very hard to make this happen and to see it come off without a hitch was fantastic.  If you haven’t seen our newest spot, featuring Jeffrey the Robot, I’ve embedded it below.  We also spent a great deal of time promoting through the social graph, as ComputerWorld notes in an article released Monday.