Exciting or upsetting?

Here are two ways you could spend five million dollars

Do consumers expect way too much from television commercials and easily get upset on the spots that fail to amaze them? Well, if you are paying as high as five million dollars for a 30-second slot, you ought to be standing out; else, what’s the point. We are talking about this year’s Super Bowl commercials.

Putting aside the average commercials of the season, here are a few that were the best and worst in the league.

Axe has grown up.
Everyone knows Axe as that typical stereotyped brand that makes being natural not-so-cool. It’s been the one-dimensional brand that appeals to dudes through illogical ads portraying how Axe could transform them into female magnets. However, the cartoony dude has evolved to being a man with sensible and richer messaging that will soon overshadow its ‘dude’ image in the market.

Titled ‘Find Your Magic’, this campaign by Axe is peeling off the outdated concept of masculinity and stressing people to embrace the individual sense of being a man. The 60-second anthem highlighting a man with a big nose, one with a suit, one with high heels, one in a wheelchair, evokes a sense of liberation in every one of us, breaking the brand’s former stereotyped image and making it more grounded.

All thanks to agency 72andSunny from Amsterdam for taking this big step of making Axe evolve from a boy to a man. Good job folks or should we say “Good job man”. The brand by Unilever deserves a bow for this unique trait. Being at the pole position of culture, Axe has set a message to liberate men from stereotypes of the world and empower them to be attractive the way they are.

Securing mortgages? How about saving your brand name first?
If there was a list of things you could waste five million dollars on, on the top of it would be making a senseless ad for Quicken Loans’ Rocket Mortgage. Trying hard to clue customers into securing mortgages through a mobile app and using the most irrelevant metaphors to explain it (like securing a mortgage as simple as buying shoes), Quicken made the worst use of its money.

From the annoying voiceover that goes something like –If getting mortgage was so easy that you could probably secure one on your phone, wouldn’t more people buy homes? To the cascading events showing people filling their homes with necessary and unnecessary home products, leading the country to some sort of economic resurgence, which the firm thinks is the power of America itself.

Well, we don’t know if the ad served the potential consumers but sure did a wonderful job acting as a flashback to the 2008 financial crisis. Not only did Quicken do a bad marketing job being the third largest mortgage lender in the US, it also received some witty comments from critics and public, especially on Twitter. Quicken Loans; you lose a million points here, no more doughnuts for you.