sjbooher: Cars, cars and more cars! Cars everywhere! Buy our cars! Super Bowl XLV was definitely the year of the car ad and this is your typical over-done, over-thought Super Bowl production. They gave it a whirl, and had a decent idea, but did not quite pull it off. G for Kenny G, the only saving grace.
jtherkal: Overall I liked it on first viewing. The Kenny G joke is enough to make you remember the spot, I like “release the hounds” in just about any context, and I walk away remembering Audi’s stance on old vs. new luxury. On closer inspection, it could have been sharper. I don’t think you had to say “I love this song,” we already get the joke. The “hoodwinked” and “scandalous” lines were both pretty lame. And why was new luxury locked in the same cell as old luxury? B+.
sjbooher: Good song, good comedy, good idea taking advantage of “green marketing”. For the non-Fox News set, it’s cool to be green right now, and this campaign capitalizes on that. A.
jtherkal: The song is enough to push it up past a C, which in this year’s crop makes this an automatic top ten. A police anteater? This was waaay better than I thought it was going to be, having seen some sort of preview before the Super Bowl. I don’t know if I’d remember which car company did it. Although if I was rich enough to afford an Audi clean Diesel, I might have paid more attention. B+.
jtherkal: Hmmmm…they did everything right here. Some action, some comedy, a celebrity. So why am I not impressed. I guess this doesn’t seem like Audi’s personality. At least the first 30-seconds, which take jabs at other luxury car makers (Lexus is for old people!), seems a bit low-brow for Audi. And I spend the first half of the ad thinking about BMW and Mercedes. B-.
sjbooher: Lexus for old people? What? Somebody missed the entire 90s when a Lexus was one of the hottest and most desirable cars on the streets. Anyway, as entertainment, this is good. As an Audi ad, horrible, especially during the Super Bowl when people are at parties and you’re lucky if they watch 5 seconds of your joint, much less a full minute or whatever before you show your product. F.
What? Horrible. Stupid. A bad ad is one thing… a bad ad that is featured as the second ad shown during the Super Bowl, is a whole ‘nother level of terrible. The fact that they fail horribly in re-making a scene from an all-time classic movie, Godfather, just makes it all the more awful. A car hood spilling oil in the bed? Huh? On the bright side, the car itself looks awesome, and good or bad, this gets the Audi R8 name out there. F.
The Mouth:
Well, if you look at the premise, that Audi is putting old luxury on notice, it actually isn’t a bad spot. That’s what the horse head in the bed was, notice. Granted, it’s a little hokey and I don’t know if it’s Super Bowl worthy, but it gets your attention and it makes sense with the messaging. And that new Audi looks HOT. B-.
The Hawk:
This is worthy of a rebuttal. In the The Godfather, man who gets a horse head in this bed is the one being put on notice. So if this spot is analogous, that implies the old guy in the bed IS old luxury. But in actuality, he’s just a man, and old luxury is actually chopped up and killed. It doesn’t even make sense. This was butchered, pun intended, at every level.
More from Mouth: You’re getting very literal now, my PC-based friend. Sure, you’re right that the man who gets the horse head was being put on notice. But don’t you think other horses associated with that horse–his friends and family–were also put on notice? I mean, they cut off that horse’s head. So technically, I think you could say that other similar horses were also put on notice, which would make the metaphor start to work. It could also be argued that the old man represents old luxury and the car, in this instance, takes the role of the horse–a beloved form of transportation.