SuperBowl50 Ads Redefine Talking Heads - Views From Prabhakar

And while a minute long talking head commercial is the creative person's nightmare, the sign off sums up an excellent commercial that slams drunken driving. 'You're friends and family thank you and your future self thanks you. This is supposed to be fun!'

The other talking head TVC was the Serena Williams Defy Labels commercial for Mini USA.  The Mini has had to overcome many labels like the short man's car', 'gay car', 'chicks car' and the commercial engages you with some engaging copy on defying labels. The Serena Williams commercial was one of a series produced by Mini with  Abby Wamback (retired soccer player, coach and 2 time Olympic Gold medalist) and others, all of whom have had to overcome negative labels during their life and career. So the juxtaposition of the celebrity defying labels, with the labels that the Mini has had to overcome as a car works very well.

Serena says in the commercial 'Wow. I have had to deal with a lot of labels. Too strong. Too sexy. too focussed on tennis. Mean. Too strong what does that mean? Too strong I don’t know.  It just means I am stronger than you. Getting past those labels for me pretty much really easy because I define myself.'

My labels? My labels that I have been labeled in my life. Oh I have been called a girl, a tomboy, a dike, a lesbian, a butch, a bitch.  A lot of them. And I don't care. Those are things for me never defined who I was.   So the commercials challenge the viewer to be defiantly different like Mini has been since 1959.

The individual commercials are then wrapped together in an excellent TVC that puts everyone together in one ad summing up the Defy Labels strap line.

So while there are a bunch of other good ads  for the SuperBowl50, I thought the talking heads commercials using celebrities reached a new standard starting with the Helen Mirren Budweiser commercial.

The use of black and white in the Mini commercial juxtaposed with Yellow Mini with the Black and White checkered top provided another interesting copy/visual juxtaposition.

In other words the SuperBowl50 talking heads commercials tried to break the label of the advertising documentary and it did that incredibly well.

https://youtu.be/6C_7OpncLLY

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About the Author

Prabhakar Mundkur is an ad veteran with over 35 years of experience in Advertising and Marketing.   He works as an independent consultant and is also Chief Mentor with Percept H.