Ads battle for championship

NEW YORK (AP) — The pressure was on. The tension was thick. And then, there were yawns in between.

The Super Bowl may have been a nail biter, but the ads were a snooze.

Actor Clint Eastwood waxed for two minutes about Detroit and Chrysler. An M&M candy stripped “naked” at a party. And stars from the 90s were everywhere, as were dogs and babies, of course.

Companies paid an average of $3.5 million for a 30-second spot for the right to duke it out Sunday in front of the expected 111 million-plus fans. But it was all so ordinary with fewer surprises.

That’s mostly because nearly half of the 70 Super Bowl advertisers put their spots out online in the days leading up to the game. That’s a big difference from last year when only a few spots were released ahead of time. And the companies that did wait until game day for the “big reveal” didn’t take many risks. In fact, most settled on cliché plots with kids, celebs, sex and humor.

An ad for domain name-hosting site GoDaddy shows racecar driver Danica Patrick and fitness expert Jillian Michaels body painting a nude woman. A spot for clothing retailer H&M features soccer star David Beckham in black-and-white in his undies. And online florist Teleflora and automaker Kia both use Victoria Secret’s model Adriana Lima in their Super Bowl ads.

But perhaps the two most blatant examples of “letting it all hang out” came from car companies.

Toyota’s spot for its “reinvented” Camry features a “reinvented” couch made up of women wearing bikinis. “It also comes in male,” a voiceover in the ad says while showing a couch of shirtless men.

And among the few standouts for the night was a Fiat ad that equated seeing the car for the first time with making out with a sexy Italian super model. The tagline: “You’ll never forget the first time you see one.”

“They did a good job of showing that some decisions are made with the heart, some decisions are made with the head and the Italian car decision resides in the groin,” said Greg Dinoto, chief creative officer of advertising agency Deutsch in New York. “It was sexy and surprising and fun.”