WASHINGTON — We’re plumbing new depths of late-stage capitalism these days.
Brands have become so self-consumed with their own ad campaigns that Jennifer Garner is sharing the story of her Capital One endorsement on screen with her father, while Nationwide has convinced itself that people want to see faux studio sessions of Peyton Manning and Brad Paisley working on ad jingles.
So it should come as no surprise that 30-second Super Bowl ads — which cost more than $1 million on average to make and another $5 million to air, a total of about 35 percent more than the entire production budget for the feature film “Get Out” — now have trailers and teasers of their own.
But we’re not going to stoop so low as to review teasers to ads. Those companies that only released commercials for their commercials — Skittles, Amazon, Tide, etc. — have made us wait, so they too will have to wait for their reviews.
Here, we’re only looking at the spots that are actually available — and that we could find in an afternoon of research — and grading them on their effectiveness through a composite score of memorability, humor and cachet around the water cooler the next day.
Flip through the slides below as we go from worst-to-first in our own grading of this year’s Super Bowl ads.
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