Superbowl commercials

Like every other North American yesterday, I watched the Superbowl. I don't really care for football particularly, although it's obviously better than watching, say, soccer, but my husband is a fan and we watch on Sundays from time to time and always do something for the Superbowl.

This year, we just had a couple friends over to our place since we have our shiny new Boxing Day TV. I have to say, the details you can see with the HDTV are incredible.

Anyway, even more than the football, there is always huge buzz generated around the commercials. Of course, up here in the Great White North, the ever-popular CRTC has made it so we can't see the American commercials. No big deal really since everything's on YouTube about 3 seconds after it airs, often even before that.

What I really don't understand is why Canadian commercials don't follow the lead of the American. I read an article that, although CTV wouldn't release its prices, an ad was going for around $120,000. The US station was charging $2.5 million! But this isn't where I see the problem.

My problem is that pretty much all of the ads were re-runs that we've seen many times before. Why is there no hype for the Canadian commercials during the Superbowl? You've got the same captive audience, albeit smaller, and people who, for one day, actually look forward to the commercials. Why are advertisers not using that to their benefit? It's just such a shame. Imagine if Canadian advertisers (who are actually mostly American companies anyway) put some extra effort into the Canadian versions of commercials–Americans might even look up our commercials on YouTube. Ok, probably not. Do they even know we have electricity way up here?