Super Bowl XLVI is just around the corner. This year NBC is charging an average of $3.5 million for each 30 second spot. Here’s a peek at what you’ll see in addition to a ton of NBC self-promo and most likely considering this is an election year, some political ads.

1ST QUARTER

Hyundai Veloster Turbo and/or Genesis Coupe R-Spec: Spot will use testosterone to “play up the performance side of Hyundai”. Actor Jeff Bridges does the voiceover. The brand will also have a 60-second spot before kickoff.
Created by: Innocean Worldwide Americas

M&Ms: The 30-second spot introduces Ms. Brown, the new character in its line of animated spokescandies. Will Ms. Green and her engage in a cat fight? Who knows. She is described as “Ms. Brown is an intelligent woman with a sharp wit who finally decided to reveal herself after working for decades behind the scenes as “chief chocolate officer.”
Created by: BBDO

UPDATED Coca-Cola: The polar bears are coming as part of the "Open Happiness" campaign. One ad in either 1st or 2nd quarter is a 30-second animated "Superstition" shows one of the bears watching the game with his fingers, toes, arms, legs and even his scarf crossed. The other is a 60-second "The Catch" has two versions. The bear cheering for the team that is losing at the time the commercial airs -- assuming the game is not tied at the time -- will make a gravity-defying catch of a flying bottle of Coke. The bears will be featured on the website throughout the game. As they sit on their "snowfa" in an Arctic cave, they will react to plays on the field, referees' calls and even commercials. At the same time, viewers can send tweets and emails to the bears with questions and comments, getting the bears responses at www.CokePolarBowl.com.
Created by: Wieden + Kennedy

Samsung have been trying so hard for so long to let people know that they too have a smartphone. It's got a huge screen and all sorts of apps and I still don't care. In this ad, which is according to gizmodo.com, ready to air on the superbowl (I am not convinced as nobody told me yet), they discreetly mock Apple-fanboys who queue up for the latest gadget and watch unboxing videos because they are....... Lemmings. Yeah like the IBM lemmings back in 1985 that Apple mocked with a whistling ad everyone hated.

My personal favorite? "I don't like your roommate very much". My god, you're mid-thirties and you can't afford your own home, but you can buy all sorts of expensive tech-gear, and you'll even camp in a line for it, and nobody seems to find this super-wrong in any way. In fact it's so ingrained in the culture right now, it's in ads. That's kinda sad, people. Sadder than your lust for Apple-gear and Samsung's want to be on top.

We've just rounded off the Beancast recording (Live from New York City!) where we talked about Super Bowl ads, groin-shots, the fail of funny and if the emphasis and hoopla surrounding the Super Bowl ads are a problematic distraction for marketers.

If the premature ad-joke-alation is distracting the brand from their strategy and message, I say yes. There have been hundreds of genuinly funny ads aired during the superbowl, and equally many where the funny failed, and in both cases if the consumer can't remember the sender of the latest groin-kick, it was a big waste of money. Huge. As an example of funny ad that stayed on message, I brought up the Tide stain pen.

Groupon has decided to pull those polarizing ads off the air, announces CEO Andrew Mason on the company blog with the post: "One Last Post on the Super Bowl"

Five days have passed since the Super Bowl, and one thing is clear – our ads offended a lot of people. Tuesday I posted an explanation, but as many of you have pointed out, if an ad requires an explanation, that means it didn’t work.

Last night watching the game (well, the ads) I yelped out If you have any stock in Groupon SELL IT NOW We're watching 1999 and just for feet happen again right before our eyes., then I wondered if this was a battle between the two to see who could scare off the most customers. Like 1999, something went very wrong in the execution of the gags in these ads. In 1999, Just for feet "Kenya Mission" killed a whole company, if Groupon isn't careful, this could be them.

This is probably just me, but I chuckled just now when I remembered the 1996 Coors Light Super Bowl commercial "Rocky Mountain high". In this ad, stranger enters the bar, is eyed up by all the local barflies, and then they break into song....

Our first Superbowl Badlander is this pairing, yes, Coke did it again. Shoutout to Anantha who jogged my memory-cells, the Coke ad border-dispute idea was once done in an ad for whisky in India. Is this becoming a habit? Last year we found the Coke sleepwalking ad had been done as an Israeli yogurt-drink ad way back in 2001. Brainsync again! Drats.

Lets compare and contrast, shall we?

It was an ad for Chrysler, it had no funny gags or groin-kicks, but it did have a celebrity cameo. And even if @adlandjones tweeted he wasn't sure if Eminem was coming to kick his ass if he didn't buy a Chrysler, this is the ad that won the hearts of the Superbowl watching general public. Joe Public told me so, this was my most favorited tweet of the evening.

Like the Clydesdales bow in 2002, America needed this ad. Detroit needed this ad. It was a 3 million dollar pep-talk that actually pep-talked. Well done Chrysler.

So this year, instead of creating the epic Super Bowl Ad spoiler as I've done in the past, this year I went in, with no knowledge (ok, a tiny bit - it's hard to avoid) of what I was going to see. The test was to see if I was less cynical of the ads. Here's what we saw.

1st Quarter:
Bud Lite - Hack Jobs - Putting Bud Light on a counter is an easy way to fix a kitchen. Ok, so what is new here? Nothing. C’mon Bud Light..can we try for a change? This ad was like something an intern did. And that’s not a slam at interns...it’s a slam at ad people who are doing ad work of freshies.

In 7 days, we'll all be gathered around the TV watching Super Bowl XLV. To make watching the ads even more enjoyable (even if they aren't), we've created a Super Bowl Ad Bingo card.

You'll find 4 boards featuring the stereotypical antics we tend to see year in and year out. Who knows, it might even take you only one spot to get to BINGO!

Download and print them before your superbowl party.

Doritos® and Pepsi MAX® are experiencing a bit of controversy regarding their annual Crash The Superbowl competition this year, as two ads depicting gay men have made the rounds on the web as if they were potential Super Bowl ad airs, despite never making it to the final round of the competition.

Frito-Lay Director of Public Relations Chris Kuechenmeister told GLAAD the ads were two out of 5,600 that were submitted to the company for its “Crash the Super Bowl” contest. He said the ads were not among the finalists chosen by a panel of judges, and have no chance of airing during the Super Bowl or otherwise.

We've been psyched since October, when Fox let it be known that the Super Bowl commercial slots were already sold out. So who will not be in the Super Bowl Commercial archive this year?

Monster.com have now moved beyond simple brand awareness. Or maybe they just grew tired of competing with Careerbuilder. Last year they had a fiddling beaver. This year, no beaver at all.

One of the fun things about the the worlds largest super bowl commercials archive is fame-spotting. Here's ten super bowl ads with actors before they were famous.

Before he was Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, or the shark-jumping Fonzie, Henry Winkler played a son in a family where shaving was such big topic, he brings his razor home when he visits the folks. Ah, the naive ad-scripts of the seventies, even the comic relief line is so old it has whiskers. How appropriate! But wait, there's more! The mother is none other than Frances Sternhagen, a character actress with a long resumé. You might know her as John Carter's grandmother in ER.

From the 1973 super bowl VII commercials.

Ok, I've come down from my sugar-high caused by way too many soda pops and candy bars that kept me chugging through, staying awake from Sunday morning to late Monday night. It's not a good state to watch and try to judge the ads in, so I'd like to thank a whole bunch of people too numerous to mention, among them DDB, TBWA, FLO TV rep Edelman, Teleflora, Lynch Communications and Medialink Worldwide for sending their ads in early to help the process along here. Y'all rock and you know it. The 2010 super bowl XLIV commercials in the collection.

I always come down pretty hard, blaming my negative reactions to lack of sleep, but overall I think this bowl was sub-par. So sub-par I almost instated a "roll-eye rating" for each ad, that's how often I caught myself rolling my eyes.

Now that I have caught some shuteye, I figured out what really bugged me with the ads. The See more online. What is this, the "AOL keyword" of the tens? Why are you telling me to see more online when you have my attention on TV? In the future, I'm sure we'll be able to click links in TV-ads, but we're not quite there yet, so hows about you TV advertisers use the TV-medium to tell us what is it you want us to know? Vizio seems busy putting the internet on TV so I guess I can see more online, on my TV soon.

Fourth Quarter:
Vizio - :60 spot by Venables, Bell & Partners, SF directed by Wally Pfister and features Beyonce Knowles-Carter.
Review: @caff ok, so this spot totally went off on the whole internet swip-age but, it makes sense for the brand (unlike other SB ads of the night).
@dabitch: UuuuGhhh, if I see Tay Zonday & the numa numa guy again in an ad I'll scream. I like robots tho. Even robot arms.

Third Quarter:
Walt Disney Pictures - :30 by in-house for Prince of Persia

Motorola - :30 by new roster agency Anomaly featuring Megan Fox and new Motoblur phone.
Review: @caff Stupid. But whatever. I thought Megan Fox was so last year. Then again, I'm not the demo.
@Dabitch I am. I TOTALLY want a phone that can take wide-angle full figure X-ray through bubbles and bathtub pictures at only arms length, and send them to all my pals just by me *thinking* that I will. That's not what it does though, is it?

Round two, coming at ya.

Second Quarter:
Budweiser - :60 entitled "Bridge" directed by Paul Middleditch of aWHITELABELproduct for DDB Chicago, with post/VFX from The Mill NY and music out of Elias Arts.
Review: @caff A human bridge? C'mon. Sure that would work. Who needs reality in a Super Bowl ad? Feels like Bud and Bud Light is trying too hard this year.
@Dabitch seriously? That's the funniest script they could think of? Do I need to be drunk on Bud to get it?

Here we go! That's right. It's game on for the in-game ads. Let's hope we see some winners tonight in the Ad Bowl. If only it's as epic as the Super Bowl intro with Jay-Z. Maybe next year they'll give a trophy to the best ad as well. ;) Based on what we've seen so far, maybe we need to call it the Trite Bowl. (ads will be filled in as we post them)

First Quarter:
Bud Light - :30 sec - Dude builds a whole house out of beer cans.
Review: @caff Typical Bud Light spot. Not very funny, it's like they tried too hard to be funny and failed.
@Dabitch yeah, it's very Bud Light. Like the beer, leaves no residue.

First, we have not received confirmation yet from Google as to whether they are running Parisian Love in the super bowl, third quarter. It's this years dark horse rumor, due to this tweet from Eric Schmidt maybe it will, maybe it won't. Not a bombastic ad by any means, but it's a nice one, however it does break the superbowlian tradition since it's been aired before. Second the spoiler post hasn't been updated since Friday but if you want to read more about each ad, that's the place to be. This is simply a cheat-sheet, with links to the ads we have already published.

See, for your bathroom planning, I decided to make a cheat sheet in order of who airs their ad when, and how long each ad is so you don't miss a sixty. Inside. The only set order is which quarter they air in, we don't know the order within that.

Adland's own Claymore has posted An open letter to my beloved advertising industry. regarding the super bowl commercials.

We totally back him on this - but don't let this stop all you agencies from sending us the ads early. ;) Now that you know where we stand I won't have to do that scouts honor swearing regarding embargoes every time you ask me to. I look so silly in my cub scout* uniform.