Auto-shopping website Auto-By-Tel and agency RBI Communications teamed up again for a sophomore Super Bowl outing in 1998, when “Come As You Are” built on the establishing work of the brand’s 1997 big-game debut (“Pain Relief”).
In a reminder that Auto-By-Tel had become the first dot-com advertiser in a Super Bowl only 12 months before, however, the protagonist still apparently needed to explain to her cat (standing in for the audience), “O.K. Camille, we’re on the internet.” The suggestions that web users need never change out of pajamas also arrives years before “bloggers in pajamas” would become a stereotype.
Auto-By-Tel outlasted may of the dot-coms that would follow it into the pantheon of Super Bowl advertisers—by a long shot. In 2017 it renamed itself AutoWeb.
BRAND: Auto-by-Tel
YEAR: 1998
AGENCY: RBI Communications
SUPERBOWL: XXXII
QUARTER AIRED: Q2