The Super Bowl.

The single biggest annual sporting event on the planet.

The pinnacle of creative television advertising.

And perhaps the quickest way to blow $4.5 million dollars outside of Las Vegas.

After awhile, Super Bowl ads have earned a high enough reputation to become a showcase of criticisms, like a one-night museum collection – you can put anything on a museum pedestal, call it art, and suddenly viewers start forming normally non-existent opinions. But instead of a museum, you have a Super Bowl TV schedule. So, here’s my six part micro-analysis on the good, the bad, the best, the game, and the left shark.

Go Beyond the Ad

Teressa Iezzi opens The Idea Writers with Droga5’s David Droga earning a spot on the 2006 Esquire “Best and Brightest” list. Being a man of the ad industry, Esquire asked him to create an ad about himself. Rather, he activated Tap Project, a UNICEF campaign supporting clean drinking water worldwide, within the ad. After a website, some restaurant endorsements, a fundraising event, water essays & more, $0 media dollars turned into $5.5 million. Droga ventured beyond the printed page and won.

Like Droga’s ad, extensions of ad mediums like print or TV such as McDonalds Pay with Lovin’ Super Bowl ad and Coca Cola’s Make It Happy ads are nothing new. In fact, the actual stories in the ads felt a little far-fetched, as alluded to by Adweek in a recap post earlier this week. But it was great to see these players launch campaigns that are part of campaigns bigger than a single 30 second blip. I’m really looking forward to how the McDonald’s campaign takes shape, and it would be great to see Coca Cola’s turn-a-frown-upside-down social media initiative explore more of 2015. Too bad Coke pulled it this week. 😦