Bob Horowitz, "Super Bowl's Greatest Commercials" and "The Singing Bee" executive producer: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1

Here’s something you probably don’t know about Mr. Media. The second of my nine books was actually about football -- Why Men Watch Football, in fact. So when the opportunity to interview Bob Horowitz came about, how could I resist?

Bob is the creator and producer of the annual special, “Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials.” You may also know one of Bob’s other creations, “The Singing Bee,” hosted by Joey Fatone, which was a summer hit for NBC in 2007 and will return soon, or the CBS interactive golf special, “Rules of the Game.”

You can LISTEN to this interview by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!

Click to open separate window

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I’m fascinated by your show. As a football fan and someone who’s done a little writing about why men watch football, I actually find it kind of hard to believe anyone still scoffs at the notion that half the fun of Super Bowl is the commercials, but I’m guessing there must be a few.

BOB HOROWITZ: The people that scoff at it, I think that’s a major reason for the mega numbers that are associated with the event. It’s funny because, in television, you often hear the season finale of XYZ TV show is going to be brought to you without commercial interruption courtesy of General Motors, Ford, whomever, alright? And that’s done as a media stunt, and they believe that that will help the ratings. Commercials in primetime are limited in terms of breaks, say, versus the sports day part, because they feel that that will help ratings, right? Less commercial interruptions. You have this whole thing about TiVo and fast-forwarding through commercials, and what do you do about that? All of it is 180 degrees different with respect to the Super Bowl. If you took the commercials out of the Super Bowl, ratings would go down. Super Bowl is the only thing that people will TiVo and fast-forward to watch the commercials.

ANDELMAN: And of course, there have been many, many years where the commercials have been vastly more interesting than the game itself.

HOROWITZ: Right, right. But I think that very much like watching, and this is my personal opinion, like watching a “Saturday Night Live.” Some “Saturday Night Live” skits are funnier than other weeks’ “Saturday Night Live” skits, and that’s really what Super Bowl commercials are. They’re these clever thirty-sixty second skits that are entertaining and the viewers like to watch. So that when we on “Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials” string them all together as a one-hour show, that’s why it does so well because people love to be entertained watching them.



ANDELMAN: I was just thinking of another analogy with “Saturday Night Live,” actually. When that show begins, just like the Super Bowl, everybody is on their edge of the seat. What’s it gonna be this week? How’s it gonna go? And usually, just after “Weekend Update” or in the case of the Super Bowl at halftime, interest starts to peter out so you need something to keep it going. And in the Super Bowl case, you’ve got the commercials.

HOROWITZ: Right. And the genesis of the idea was not created on a mountaintop. It was just an observation of watching people at a Super Bowl party eight years ago in New York City that I was attending that they’re watching the game, and there’s that buffet table with the sandwiches and the chili and all that. During the game, there are people mulling around there talking. “Hey, how ya doing?” “Haven’t seen you in a while.” “Great, great, da da da da da.” All of a sudden, it went to a commercial time-out. Game goes to commercial. People rushed back from the buffet table to watch the commercials. I kind of said, “Commercials? I think they deserve their own show.”

ANDELMAN: Did you ever imagine you’d be doing this for what I guess is eight years now?

HOROWITZ: Yes. No, no, no, although every year, it’s funny. We sit there before the show, Steve Mayer, myself, the other executive producer, and we go, “What should we do differently?” And we both have this -- call it a governor -- where we’re just careful that if we go too far, one pitches the other one and says, “Just remember, people just want to watch the old commercials. We don’t have to be so creative.” The creativity was already done when the commercials were made.


ANDELMAN: Tell me about the show. It’s a countdown format, right?

HOROWITZ: It’s a countdown format in the show where we have selected, over the years of doing the Super Bowl commercials show, we mulled through all the various commercials. We’ve had fans vote on them. The producers of the show come up with the Top 10 commercials. They’ve been parked on cbs.com, so over the course of January, viewers and online users have been able to go to cbs.com to view those commercials. They’ve voted on their favorite. And in the show, we start with number 10 and count them down. Jim Nantz and Daisy Fuentes go from 10 to 9 to 8 to 7 to 6 to 5 to 4, and when we get to 4, and we stop, and we announce the final three, the top three commercials as voted on over the past month on cbs.com. And then we open it live to viewers across America on CBS to vote on one of those three spots as their favorite commercial of all time. And what was at stake was a Super Bowl game where we had New England going for the first perfect, perfect, perfect 19-0 season, and we had Mean Joe Greene going for a perfect 7-0. So we’ll see whether he gets unseated this year.

ANDELMAN: So are you saying that Mean Joe, that Coke commercial, is in the top three?

HOROWITZ: I would say there’s a good chance of that.

ANDELMAN: What have been some of your own favorites over the years?

HOROWITZ: I love the Budweiser spots, but I love clever commercials. I love those commercials that have you asking, “Where’s this going?” I know there are some big moments here at the end. Funny, funny, right? I love clever, funny spots so I love the Budweiser commercials. I love the ones with the Clydesdales and the dogs where they also tug at that emotional part of you. But then again, I also love those commercials that do not cost a lot of money but that are clever because there’s this misnomer that says, “Oh, Super Bowl commercials that cost now upwards of $3 million dollars to buy, they should cost the most amount of money to produce” isn’t the case. So one of my favorites to make that point would be the FedEx spot. I don’t know if you remember that one where all of a sudden, the commercial comes up, and it’s just bars and that annoying tone, right? And then a crawl comes below the bars and tone that says, “Our ad agency bought this commercial for $2 million dollars. Unfortunately, they didn’t use FedEx to get the spot to the network, and it never made it there.”

ANDELMAN: Right, right, right.


HOROWITZ: “We have fired our ad agency, and we’re out two million dollars.” How much did that cost? Ten dollars to make, right? And yet, it made the point of what FedEx is all about. It’s not always about the gazillion dollars and the special effects even though some of those are very, very clever. Anyway, those are some of my favorites.

ANDELMAN: Bob, how important is, and maybe we can kind of balance these, humor in these commercials versus talking animals versus celebrities? Is there a hierarchy of what works and what doesn’t?

HOROWITZ: No, I really don’t think so. The P-Diddy stuff was great. The Cindy Crawford/Pepsi stuff has been great. Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, all those celebrity spots, the nothing-but-net, all great.

ANDELMAN: Right.

HOROWITZ: Celebrity at the right moment, celebrity meets clever -- great. I love that. I think the animals tug at your emotions. I think those are the other group of great spots. Either the emotion or the celebrity clever.

ANDELMAN: Bob, am I wrong in thinking that the humorous commercials are usually the most successful?

HOROWITZ: No, I think you’re probably right. I would say the most successful, as in the water cooler conversation. Most successful now, now you have the USA Today ad meters like the ratings in the morning. They come afterwards, and it’s not necessarily all about the funny, the humorous. I think, though, if you’re talking about water cooler voting, you’ve gotta be funny. You’ve gotta be funny.

ANDELMAN: Now, of course, there are exceptions: the Macintosh ad, of course, the “1984” ad, and of course, the one you mentioned, Mean Joe Greene, which recurs every year. But I know when I think about Super Bowl ads, I want to laugh and particularly if the game sucks, I want to laugh in between because I know the football announcers are not going to make me laugh. I know if Janet Jackson’s going to come in at halftime and flash me…

HOROWITZ: And have her wardrobe malfunction, yeah.

ANDELMAN: Yeah. I’m also thinking about Kevin Federline’s spot last year…

HOROWITZ: Right.

ANDELMAN: I can’t say we thought it at the time, but in retrospect, that spot did as much for turning around his public image as Britney Spears publicly crashing and burning since then did for him.

HOROWITZ: Exactly, exactly. And again, I find that Kevin Federline and his management team was quite clever to do that spot of him flipping burgers because it was self-deprecating. He made fun of himself, and I think that got people to maybe think just a little bit nicer of Kevin Federline. We actually have him in the show. I can’t give away what we’re doing, but we will show that spot again, and then we did a very much “Saturday Night” take-off skit with Kevin in this year’s show that he cooperated and leads us through some commercials.

ANDELMAN: I would have never guessed that a year later, I would actually think more of him than of her. It’s interesting.

HOROWITZ: Pretty unbelievable.

ANDELMAN: Long term, do you have any thoughts on which brands have benefited the most from their Super Bowl spots?

HOROWITZ: That’s a good question. Probably Budweiser. I would say Budweiser and Pepsi. Coke has had great ads, but I think the Pepsi ads have been very funny and have done a lot for Pepsi and the same, obviously, for Budweiser. But there, you’re talking about two either brand leaders or number one, twos that don’t necessarily need the Super Bowl. Budweiser has eight spots in the game. They’re going to be number one no matter what, but as old man Wrigley said in advertising to some reporter that was asking him, “Why do you advertise when you have 100 percent market share with Wrigley’s gum?” And they were flying in a propeller plane, and he said to the reporter, “Look outside. Just because we’re flying along fine doesn’t mean you cut the engines.” So I think if you’re Budweiser, you do it because you’re the market leader and people expect you to do it. And I do believe deep down inside why it gets the big rating is people are looking for Budweiser to do that. They’re the creative. So Budweiser and Pepsi would be my answer.


ANDELMAN: And what is the mark of an unsuccessful commercial that debuts on Super Bowl Sunday?

HOROWITZ: I’m not going to say any by name. Part of the unsuccessful is that I don’t remember who they are. But I think a lot of the dotcoms were unsuccessful where they got to be too cute. They tried to play like FedEx, and it fell flat. Look at the godaddy spots, godaddy.com. That’s pretty unbelievable. The ads might be a little disgusting, but they definitely are clever. There’s one that maybe does something to push the needle and be a little affecting, and they’re successful for a different reason.

ANDELMAN: I’m thinking back to last year, and I remember that at the end of the game, we looked at it and were talking about the commercials, and it just seemed like there were a lot of people that had spent a ton of money on commercials that they thought would dazzle us, and they weren’t funny. They didn’t really get the point of their product across, and they weren’t memorable. And I can’t even think of those brands now, but I remember at the time thinking man, what a waste.



HOROWITZ: Right, right. Think about it. That’s a godaddy.com. Where do you see godaddy spots? Really nowhere other than the Super Bowl. And so they’re ones that you’d say I guess they’re successful because look at every year, eleven months, three weeks later, we’re still talking about them versus those that you say I can’t remember, but I know there were some there that weren’t good. And therein lies the point of they just weren’t good cause you don’t remember them.

ANDELMAN: And, Bob, have you ever done commercials? Have you ever worked in that medium?

HOROWITZ: No, no. As an avocation, yes. I’m involved in the marketing of our TV shows, and I’d like to think that my fascination with Super Bowl spots is I like to be creative with promo spots or if I were to be dabbling as a producer, but I have not done it as a profession, no.

Click Here to Keep Reading!

© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.