February 6, 2006

Anheuser-Busch wins big in USC Ad Bowl III Poll

It’s official! University of South Carolina advertising students have given Anheuser-Busch a clean sweep, with the Bud Light magic refrigerator commercial voted the most effective ad in Sunday night’s Super Bowl annual array of high-cost, creative advertising. Budweiser and Bud Light ads also won in three categories: persuasiveness, likability and brand identity.

Nearly 60 students and faculty from the School of Journalism and Mass Communications attended Ad Bowl III to critique Super Bowl ads. (View photos from the event.)

Students in Associate Professor Bonnie Drewniany’s “Super Bowl Commercials: 1984 to 2006” class gathered for the big game at Newsplex, the USC/Ifra converged newsroom. They systematically rated each ad during the Super Bowl to assess how brand identity, likability and persuasiveness were manifested in the commercials.

The Bud Light "secret refrigerator" commercial was rated the most persuasive and most liked commercial by the students and faculty, winning the annual Cocky award. The Budweiser young Clydesdale "dreams big" commercial was chosen by the students and faculty as the ad with the strongest brand identity.

How the students and faculty ranked the ads:

To enhance the program this year, Professor Drewniany developed a rating system on the school’s Web site. At the end of the game on Sunday evening, journalism school alumni and friends cast their votes online for one hour.

Online voters selected the young Clydesdale commercial the winner in all three categories. Other commercials receiving high marks from online voters included Dove's self-esteem ad for young girls and Ford Motor's "green is good" spot featuring Kermit the frog.

How alumni and friends of the University ranked the ads:

“Ad Bowl shows creativity in the classroom where our advertising students assess the creativity of the ads on the screen,” said Charles Bierbauer, dean of the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies, who attended the event. “The game is not incidental, but the only replays we watch are the ads.”

Each student was issued a CPS, a remote control polling device, and asked to rate the commercials after viewing them. A Replay TV system paused the telecast after each commercial aired.

Super Bowl ads cost $2.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime. “The commercials appealed to a broad spectrum of people — from the feel-good commercial for Dove to the in-your-face humor of the Go Daddy commercial,” Professor Drewniany said.

Over the last few weeks, students in Professor Drewniany’s class have reviewed commercials from previous years to identify trends and determine the strengths — and weaknesses — in each new commercial. Freshman Robert Kneece described the evaluation system as “really effective."

"I can evaluate commercials from the standpoint of a consumer,” he said.

Sophomore advertising student Angela Bingham said, “It was obvious the journalism department made a great effort to put this together.”

Professor Drewniany was pleased with the results of the evening. “My students and I are looking forward to I-Comm Week, when we invite the magic refrigerator ad creators to visit my class. We’ll be able to get a good sense of their thinking when they developed the commercial.”

See which ads won in 2005 and 2004>>