From Apple’s ‘1984’ To Intel’s ‘Lunch Room’: 8 Epic Super Bowl Tech Ads
Be it Xerox or Microsoft, tech brands tend to cash in on the Super Bowl to come out with amazingly creative commercials.
Super Bowl is known for the advertisements featured in it almost as much as the football which it is all about. So, it is hardly surprising that a number of tech companies have used the Super Bowl to put their best advertising feet forward.
Indeed, advertising during the Super Bowl is considered to be one of the most high-profile ways to reach a large audience. And tech brands in particular tend to use the occasion to come out with amazingly creative commercials.
Of course, not all have managed to do so successfully, although at least one brand used the occasion to come out with what many consider to be the greatest tech ad of all time.
So, as we sit back with some popcorn, this is also perhaps a good time to remember some other great tech ads at the Super Bowl. These in our opinion were eight of the best:
Apple: 1984 (1984)
All right, everyone and their grandmother knew that this ad would be on this list. That is just how famous Apple’s iconic 1984 Macintosh has become.
The ad which showcased the Macintosh’s rebelliousness in an increasingly IBM-dominated world, shows a young athletic girl throwing a hammer to smash a screen that is spewing instructions and commands to robot-like spectators in an Orwellian world.
It still remains incredibly striking, even though it is more than thirty years old.
Google: Parisian Love (2010)
A Super Bowl ad without a single actor and even a single line of dialogue? Well, Google delivered that with its ‘Parisian Love’ ad in 2010, which in our books remains one of the greatest tech ads of all time.
The ad just shows text being entered in a Google Search box and results being showed, showcasing how fast the search engine works and its versatility. And oh, in the process, it shows how a relationship develops between the user and a girl in Paris.
Simply beautiful. Beautifully simple.
Mophie: All Powerless (2015)
The world has gone mad. It is snowing in desert regions, raining fish, gravity has seemingly gone for a walk in some places, trees are bursting into flames, dogs are taking their owners for a walk and well, it seems as if the apocalypse is in the air and the world is coming to an end.
What is the almighty up to? Cut to a place that seems like heaven and a person in white holding a phone that is out of battery and then comes what we consider to be one of the most clever ad lines we have seen in tech: “when your phone dies, God knows what can happen.”
A really divine way of pushing battery chargers, we think.
Xerox: Monks (1976)
Oh yes, the PC wars had not even begun yet and there was no Microsoft or Apple in the spotlight, but that did not mean there was no great tech advertising in 1976.
Xerox did a magnificent job with this ad which had a monk, Brother Dominic, enlisting the help of Xerox to get five hundred copies of a document as required by his superior.
The Xerox 9200 duplicating system does his task at an “incredible two pages per second,” allowing Dominic to get back to his superior with the five hundred copies, at which the latter exclaims in best Biblical tradition: “It’s a miracle!”
Yes, photocopying was a miracle at that time.
Microsoft: Empowering (2014)
“What is technology?” says a robotic voice in the background, as this ad goes through a number of technological achievements in a surprisingly human manner – the reaction of a person hearing her voice for the first time, a person using an artificial arm, a father seeing his newborn in spite of being thousands of miles away.
The voice continues to speak “technology has taken us places we only dreamed. It gives hope to the hopeless…” and then concludes by saying “and it has given voice to the voiceless,” when it cuts to show former NFL player Steve Gleason who himself suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (the Lou Gehrig disease) in which people love the control of a number of voluntary muscles, and struggle to speak and even breathe.
Inspiring. Even now. Even though the Kinect is history (yes, it is shown).
Intel: Lunch Room (2010)
One of the shortest ads in this selection, this 32-second video depicted a lunchtime table with Intel executives discussing what the company has been working on. One declares that the Intel Core processors are “the most amazing technological achievement in the history of the company.”
He continues to gush about the chips, not noticing a white robot standing next to him with lunch. The robot gets so upset by his declarations, that he drops his lunch in shock and wheels away dejectedly, pursued by a lady shouting “Jeffrey.”
Gentle humour and great plugging of the new chip, though everyone went “awww” for the sad robot.
Wix.com: Big Game First Spot (2017)
Jason Statham and Gal Gadot unleash all sorts of mayhem in a restaurant, beating up (what we assume are) the baddies, breaking furniture and ultimately blowing up an entire floor.
The chef does not notice.
Why? Because he is making his own website using Wix.com’s incredibly easy-to-use website creation services (and wearing headphones).
Yes, he does realise something is amiss when smoke enters the room and walks into the mess that was his restaurant to see Gadot and Statham standing among the debris. Gadot picks up a dessert that has miraculously survived the mayhem and asks “Can I have this to go?”, which results in a goofy grin from the stunned chef.
Yes, some people thought it was an ad for headphones, but it remains a terrific commercial in our book.
Amazon: Alexa loses her voice (2018)
This has got to be one of the most entertaining ads ever screened at the Super Bowl. It begins with Amazon’s famous voice assistant, Alexa, losing her voice. A concerned Jeff Bezos (yes, he is in the ad too) is told by his team that replacements are ready and he just has to “say the word.”
And what replacements they are — Gordon Ramsay schools a person who asks for a recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich, Rebel Wilson cracks risque jokes and just when you thought you had seen everything, Sir Anthony Hopkins brings in oodles of menace by channelling Hannibal Lecter.
Of course, the real Alexa returns at the end, but her replacements and their performances made the ad a classic, while also subtly highlighting the importance of the voice and tone of a voice assistant.
And one more…
Motorola: Empower the People (2011)
All right, we HAD to include this one simply because the list began with Apple’s 1984 slot. Twenty-seven years later, it was a rather different world with Apple no longer the underdog, especially when it came to tablets, where its iPad was dominating the market.
Trust Motorola then to take a 1984ish swipe at Apple with an ad about its own tablet, the Xoom. The Xoom user is the only one casually dressed in a crowd of people wearing white, hooded overalls and having white earphones.
The Xoom user uses his “more versatile” tablet to impress a girl, making her take off her white earphones. Not as dramatic as 1984, but it did grab attention. Unfortunately, the tablet itself came a bit of a cropper. Android tablets never really recovered.
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