Amateur Super Bowl Commercials Prove Most Popular

The Super Bowl has come and gone and it is time to nurse a slight hangover, pop a few tums, and worry about how you are going to pay off gambling debt. It is also time to reminisce about the best commercials from yesterday's big game. There were not that many memorable commercials. Coke had a good showing with some well done, interesting commercials. Bud light was omnipresent as usual. The commercial with the guy dressed as a big red heart was a very desperate attempt at cutting edge creativity, but may have gotten its point across about heart attacks.

Many of the commercials were predictable, hack-neyed, or just plain boring. The few commercials that did stand out, however, were commercials created by amateurs. More and more, the creation of not only entertainment content, but marketing content as well, is being shifted into the hands of the audience members themselves--the "lay people"--people not really associated with the "entertainment industry." Some call this shift to user-generated content the "Youtube effect."

The commercials made by amateurs proved to be the most memorable ones. Dorito's held a contest called "Crash the Super Bowl," and asked normal, everyday people to submit videos of their commercial ideas. The top five commercials were shown and one was voted as the overall winner. These were very entertaining and stood out among the crowd, outshining the advertisements created by poll-taking, high-dollar-charging, big-name Manhattan Ad agencies.

This is an interesting shift from professional ad content to audience-created content, but if you think about, it makes complete sense. It is essentially the audience selling products to itself. What better way to sell a product? This is only the beginning of these viral-style advertisements. The fact that these were shown during the biggest advertising frenzy of the year, where 30 seconds of network air time costs $2.6 million dollars shows how much faith a large company like the one that owns Dorito's puts in this type of content.