I don't typically give a rat's ass about Super Bowl commercials. I don't care for the hype, which is inevitably overdone, I don't believe that they're about anything other than conspicuous consumption on the part of our megacorporations, and I generally find them to be a lot less clever than they seem to think they are.
Let me state unequivocally, though: the commercial for Lost where they superimposed Robert Palmer's largely forgettable "Addicted to Love" into clips from Lost and did music video cuts on it was HORRIBLE. Horrible.
First of all, it's not that kind of show. The commercial was misleading at best, and made Lost out to be an action-thriller, which it's not.
Second, if you want to attract new viewers, and I assume that this was at least partly the point, then how about this? Advertise the fact that you can get episodes on the cheap via iTunes--it's an innovative practice, and it makes it a lot easier for people to catch up. My experience may not be representative, but over and over, the biggest reason that I hear for people not watching Lost is that they don't want to try and hop in mid-stream. So why not market the solutions that you've developed for that? Why in the world would you do a dopey music video commercial for a show that's popular precisely because it's not a fast food kind of show?
The odd thing about this is that ABC has had huge success in the past two years with ensemble, character-driven drama, and instead of promoting these shows as such, they run the same old marketing ploys. People watch Lost not because of this kind of crap, but despite it.
That's all.
Update: Consider this fair warning. I'm going to start editing out spam comments and trackbacks--if you trackback my page and don't put up a corresponding link to this page on yours, I take that as (a) a violation of the spirit of the trackback, (b) a personal affront, (c) an invitation to be added to my blacklist. Seriously. It's lame.
