Dumbest Ads of the 2010 NFL Season

One of the many side-shows of the Super Bowl is the commercials.  As big a tradition as the game itself is the analysis of what runs in the world’s most expensive advertising time.  During the regular season, I typically watch Packers games with about a 20-minute buffer on my DVR, which enables me to fast forward over commercials.  A typical football broadcast includes over an hour of commercials (and only 11 minutes of actual action, according to the Wall Street Journal), and those ads can get pretty damn painful – particularly the campaigns that run so often that you can practically recite them.

There were three advertising campaigns during the 2010 NFL season that deserve special recognition for their idiocy, annoyance, and ubiquity.  In spite of my fast-forwarding, these campaigns were virtually inescapable.  Here are my top picks for the worst NFL ad campaigns of 2010:

1) Tie between Viagara and Cialis – It’s always a reach-for-the-remote moment when these ads come on, so as to avoid questions from my young children like, “Daddy, what’s an erection?”  Viagra and Cialis ads are so pervasive that you’d think every man in America suffers from ED.  It’s always the side-effect warnings that crack me up.  If anyone needs to be told to seek immediate medical help for “an erection lasting more than 4 hours” or a “sudden dramatic loss of hearing or vision” then maybe he ought to think twice before procreating in the first place.  I picture a guy, blind and deaf due to self-medication with blue hands and feet due to low circulation, declaring, “Don't call 9-1-1 yet, honey, I’ve only had an erection for 3 hours.”  If I had an erection lasting more than 4 hours I think I’d need a blood transfusion.  And a cigarette.  Let’s keep ads for male performance drugs where they’re supposed to be – clogging up your inbox with spam – not on the Super Bowl.

2) Miller Lite Vortex Bottle – You’ve all seen this commercial where the guy orders a light beer and the waitress condescendingly asks “Don’t you want a Miller Lite Vortex Bottle?”  When the guy protests asking what the big deal is about the Vortex bottle, she replies “It has grooves…” with a “you dumb ass” look on her face.  Maybe I’m too old, but what the hell are they talking about?  What… am I supposed to screw this thing to a garden hose and make a beer bong?   Word of warning to prospective buyers wooed by the pitch “the Vortex grooves let that great pilsner taste flow right out,” if you’re buying your beer on the basis of the velocity with which it flows from the bottle to your mouth, you may want to get a second opinion on your drinking habits.  Why didn’t they just include a pull-tab on the bottom so you can shotgun it properly?  They should just call this what it is: the “Miller Lite Shitface Bottle” and add the 800 number for AA next to their “Please Drink Responsibly” footnote.

Thank God I have this cold-activated can!

3) Coors Light Cold-Activated Can – Another brain-dead “innovation” from our friends at MillerCoors.  Like the Vortex Bottle, the Cold-Activated Can is a solution to a problem nobody has.  Evidently designed for the hard of touch, this can is supposed to tell me by way of the mountains turning blue that it’s cold.  Now, presumably, I’ve picked up the can to inspect the aforementioned mountains, at which point one would think I could ascertain whether the can I was holding was A) Cold, or B) Not Cold.  Maybe the Coors folks thought this would be a useful back-up sensory system for the drinker who is so inebriated that he’s lost his sense of feeling and most of his motor skills.  As he lays with his cheek pressed to the floor and eyes at half mast, he need only to glance at those blue mountains and rest assured that the next beer will not only trigger vomiting but is darn cold.

Hopefully, Madison Avenue has something more creative up their sleeve for the Super Bowl, because if any of these ads run for the 300th time on Sunday I may hurl my remote control into the TV.  And I don’t want to miss the game.