Hulu’s Super Bowl Ad Comes With An Ad

Hulu’s Super Bowl Ad Comes With An Ad
by Erick Schonfeld on February 1, 2009 [from TechCrunch]


The Super Bowl is perhaps the one television event where people actually look forward to the ads because so much effort is put into each one. And every year, there are a handful of standouts. You can watch the ads plenty of places online, including on Hulu. You can even watch Hulu’s own Super Bowl ad on Hulu, which oddly enough is preceded by a regular Web video ad. That just seems wrong to me on so many levels, especially since Hulu itself (which is partly owned by NBC) probably didn’t have to pay for the spot

I guess you could argue that some of these commercials are now entertainment in their own right, and thus deserve their own mini-commercials. The Hulu spot with Alec Baldwin (above) is certainly one of the better ones. He delivers the line:

They say TV will rot your brain. That’s absurd. TV only softens the brain, like a ripe banana. To take it all the way, we’ve created Hulu.

There were also lots of ads that poked fun at the economic downturn, including an ETrade ad with talking babies and a Cash4Gold.com ad starring Ed McMahon and and MC Hammer. To get people to come into its restaurants, Denny’s decided to offer free breakfast to everyone in America on Tuesday. But my favorite is this one from Monster.com which asks, Need Another Job?

CareerBuilder hit the same theme, but wasn’t quite as funny. In fact, CareerBuilder’s ad which repeatedly shows a woman miserable with her job screaming in her car, is downright depressing.

Then, of course, the trailer to the new Star Trek movie debuted as well, which I will embed below just because I know you will watch it (the trailer for Transformers 2 will also be popular).

Which was your favorite Super Bowl ad, and why?