Posting daily at 1pm central about all kinds of things. One day it's dating, the next it's TV commercials. I hope you're entertained. Professional photos on SmugMug – https://benwilder.smugmug.com
Everybody has choices, especially when it comes to fast food. Chipotle wants us to say “Yep” to their fresh food and “Nope” to thawed out meals from other restaurants. Check it out then scroll down for more info…
The Song. From 2015, this is a song from E-40 called “Choices (Yup)”. This is a great use of the chorus for a message Chipotle only has 30 seconds to deliver to the viewer. Here’s the full track… and warning about the language. There’s a lot of foul words in this one.
I don’t have (fresh) beef with the commercial, even if my feelings for Chipotle have frozen over (like a McDonald’s nugget in transit). Why am I being cold? I find it hard to believe the YouTube video has 1.6 million views in just 3 days but only 4 comments.
Did Chipotle buy views? Yup. Are they going to get away with it? Yup. Now do I trust them with food I’m putting into my body? Nope.
Campbell’s Soup has a series of ads where no one talks and I’m going to talk about it. They’re weird. In the ad below, a couple of boys come to the kitchen after playing outside in the snow. They’re eerily quiet until they utter, “mm mm good.”
It’s so unnatural. When was the last time two brothers ran through the front door and weren’t hooping and hollering about the fun they had in the snow? Get it together Campbell’s! In another ad, a family bakes mac and cheese and the longest line of the whole ad is written on a sticky note. I’m starting to think we’re all in a sequel of “A Quiet Place” and it’s giving me icky vibes.
I understand the idea that sometimes silence can say a lot when it comes to advertising. When we’re blasted with messages, sound, music, voiceovers, telling us to buy this and buy that, there’s an effective way to draw the viewers attention by what we’re not hearing. But when the only human sounds are grunts and one word conversations, it’s a no from me, Campbell’s.
And the winner of the best Super Bowl commercial goes tooooooooo……… *drumroll* Actually scratch that, no drumroll. Budweiser wins. Everyone else… just go home. They really brought it with their commercial featuring a few signature American icons– an eagle, the clydesdale horse, and “Freebird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Here’s this year’s best Super Bowl commercial…
This ad is great for every reason you can think of. First– tiny, baby animals. Everyone knows animals are at their cutest when they’re young and that’s an instinctual characteristic of humans– to think of baby humans (and other mammals and animals) as cute. It’s why we say “awwwww” when we see a puppy, or birds in a nest, or even that one baby our friend has who’s really not that cute at all.
Budweiser pairs a foal and an eaglet together and our collective hearts are melted. The unlikely duo grow up, which is hard to show in a serious way in less than a minute, mostly with the young horse helping the eagle spread its wings. They don’t get into how the horse gets food for the bird, where the bird sleeps at night, how predators were denied day in and day out, that’s much too realistic for this “warm and fuzzy” commercial.
And then there’s “Freebird,” the next reason this ad is killer. Using this song for the ad is kind of like looking at your friend’s baby and saying “Awwwww so cute!” when the baby is, like I said before, not cute. So even if you don’t like this song, you keep that to your unpatriotic self. In this case, though, the song is a perfect fit and there won’t be anyone who trashes the song or the ad in any comment section… except for an occasional flyby post reminding us all of the Bud Light fiasco from a couple of years ago. 🥴
Here’s a performance of “Freebird” from one of my top 5 favorite movies, Elizabethtown.
It’s such a great movie starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst. Thank you Budweiser, for reminding me of this gem of a movie and putting together the best Super Bowl commercial this year.
It might just be me, but are the two teams who made it to the Super Bowl this year kind of boring? Unless you’re already a New England Patriots fan or a Seattle Seahawks fan, are you like me and asking yourself, “Who cares?” There aren’t a lot of human stories coming from these teams, except for Sam Darnold (QB for Seattle) having left a couple of other teams and now shining as a SB contender. Or coach of the Patriots, Mike Vrabel, getting fired from the Titans and now he brought his team to the Super Bowl.
Am I missing anything with either of these two teams? Of course, the Seahawks have a chance to right a wrong. Remember when they passed the ball instead of running it with Marshawn Lynch in Super Bowl XLIX…
Comment below with what you’ll be doing instead of watching the game.
I started out with just a single photo I captured just before going on an AI binge. Here is the first photo, no edits.
From that one image, here is what I created with Gemini on a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra through their Nano Banana software. Some are great AI creations, others not so much. Which is your favorite and least favorite?
Out of the Wilderness 