Super Bowl Ads: Amateur Hour

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People do have a passion for fame and media exposure, though, and that has proved to be the peanut butter to the anxious ad industry's chocolate. Small surprise then, at how well the clever Doritos finalists, for all their lo-fi production, echo the old tropes of professional Super Bowl ads: funny animals, slapstick and double entendres. There's a future for You in the ad game, if You are this good at aping Them.

But it doesn't exactly square with the idealistic lingo advertisers use to discuss consumer-created ads: "authenticity," "bringing the consumer into the conversation," "crashing the Super Bowl." For all the populist, techno-utopian rhetoric, the upshot is someone giving cheap labor to a rich company. (Five Doritos finalists won $10,000 each, a net payout of less than 50 bucks an entrant.) Turning the Internet into a global intern pool has made some funny ads, but that doesn't equal empowered customers. "If you want to talk to your consumer, talk to them," says Stevens. "Ask them why they're not eating your chips."

The most famous Super Bowl ad played into the notion of consumer empowerment: Apple's "1984" ad, which depicted a renegade hurling a hammer through a giant TV image of a dictator. The rebel, of course, smashed only a picture, not Big Brother himself, and so it is with the new cadre of citizen-salesmen. The Super Bowl ad party may be admitting the masses this year, but don't expect them to arrive with a crash. More like a ka-ching.