327. The Super Bowl Spot That Wasn't.
Feb 11, 2011 at 11:59AM
jj

The following spot from Strawberry Frog (post work from The Mill) has everything you'd want from a Super Bowl spot. It tells a story, has a celebrity, uses that celebrity in an interesting way, is thoughtful and funny at once, and builds off of some human truth. Oh, and it's gorgeously shot. This could have replaced half of the real Super Bowl spots last week with ease. The only one that stands up to this type of epic production was the Chrysler piece with Eminem. (Which although I'm no fan of his either, it worked on a lot of levels. Even though the rapper has baggage, was used in an earlier spot mentiong that he didn't 'do' commercials, and looked like he was 15 behind the wheel - he made that story come together. I got chills at the tagline Imported from Detroit. But you've seen that one already.)

The Jim Beam spot, Parallel, focuses on the choices we all make and how they can send us down totally different paths using one of my favorite actors Willem DaFoe as the hero. They probably could have thrown in a 'choose to drink responsiby' line in there somewhere, but that would have killed the mood. I hope they have some extended version of this (even longer than the 1:30 below) because I simply want to see more. Maybe it will pop up over the next few weeks. Unless you're the city of Milwaukee, there's nothing to dislike here.

Article originally appeared on Graphicology (http://www.graphicology.com/).
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