Ad Age dives into Super Bowls past for cool trends, weird stuff and forgotten classics. From the Super Bowl Ad Archive, your resource for more than 1,000 big-game spots plus credits and context.
In the struggle to stand out with an expensive ad on Super Bowl Sunday, a memorable song can go a long way. If you haven't thought of these lately, listen again today. You'll remember them tomorrow.
5. This Bud's for You
Budweiser's "Neighbors" Super Bowl ad from 2011 turns the longstanding "This Bud's for You" theme into a paean to the heartland.
4. 4x4ever
Jeep's "4x4ever" promotion of its 75th year in business delivered the newest kickass Super Bowl anthem, an energetic original song performed by Morgan Dorr.
3. The Best a Man Can Get
If you can get past the outdated imagery in this hopelessly 80s montage for Gillette, the theme song just about turns shaving into a victory.
2. Cheese, Glorious Cheese
Now we're really getting somewhere. The American Dairy Association in 1986 elevated this ad for a kind of food, an ingredient at best, to something woth a singalong. The anthem here was a take on Lionel Bart's opening song in the musical "Oliver," which found hungry child laborers dreaming of "Food, Glorious Food." The new version was written by Kirk Kirkpatrick, then an associate creative director at the San Francisco office of D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles who had also just seen the movie "Oliver."
1. I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke
This lovely embrace of peace and soda was not just "a signal moment in multicultural marketing," as Simon Dumenco writes of "Hilltop" in the Super Bowl Ad Archive, but an ad that "rocked American and global pop culture":
Studio singers assembled by Davis and dubbed The Hillside Singers released the "Hilltop" song as a single, minus references to Coke and retitled "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony)." It peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Another version of the song by British group The New Seekers hit No. 1 in the U.K. and other countries.
"Hilltop," of course, also wound up playing the Emerald City to Don Draper's long journey on "Mad Men."
Previously from the Archive: Stars in Super Bowl Ads (Before They Were Famous).