In all, Hank Stuever is right that last night’s Super Bowl ads were not so memorable. “The commercials blazed no new creative territory and even verged on dud gags and filed-down ideas,” writes the Washington Post columnist. “Like hot wings lacking spice, Go Daddy experienced an impotence brought on by its own puerility, while the E-trade baby ran out of things to say. A little boy urinated in a swimming pool to get you interested in software to do your taxes. A head popped out of a man’s shoulder to get you to visit a car sales Web site. Ferris Bueller came back, played by the doughy and appropriately aged Matthew Broderick—but it turned out all he had to show was this year’s Honda.”
In part, the ads seemed so lackluster because, as Stuever notes, we’d already seen them online. But he must have taken a bathroom break when this ad for the Fiat Abarth came on. The car itself looks terrible. The model, on the other hand…