Skittles’ 2017 Super Bowl commercial introduces new idea of romance (video)
Skittles is a company with a long history of producing ads for the Super Bowl, but that does not necessarily mean that many of them are actually all that good. Last year’s Steven Tyler spot was one of the biggest disappointments of the year, and they are sometimes so off the wall that we wonder who agreed to pay millions of dollars for them.
This time around, at least they’ve got an idea that is a little more of a winner in “Romance” — though we’re not saying that this is an ad that we’d ever want to watch again.
What worked – The premise is solid. You’ve got a guy who is desperate to get the attention of Katie, the girl he loves. Therefore, he decides that throwing Skittles into her window is the best way in order to achieve that. What he doesn’t anticipate is that instead of Katie, there are a long line of people upstairs eating the candy as he throws it in. It’s simple, but it’s effective and it’s clear why this is happening: People love the candy. We get it. We would eat Skittles every day if we could.
What didn’t – The issue that the ad runs into is that after you see a few seconds of people sliding by, you start to get this feeling that you’ve maybe seen everything that the ad is going to bring to the table. It gets slightly more wacky as it goes along, but this is a sketch that could benefit from piping up the crazy to 11 and giving you an even stranger group of people waiting on the other side other than a cop and a CGI animal. Some ads from Skittles are too wacky in premise; this one had a solid premise, so it could’ve went wackier in execution.
Overall – While not spectacular, it’s hard to kill Skittles too much for realizing that their last ad was far too weird for its own good. This is a return to respectability, and there is somewhere that the company can work from with this. Grade: B-.
What did you think of the ad? Share now in the comments, and head over here to get some other commercials from the big game! (Photo: Skittles.)
