SuperBowl Ads (Not Really) From Startups

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Sunday, February 4th, 2007

Today’s the day – SuperBowl XLI. Hundreds of millions of people around the world will eat junk food, drink beer, and watch the best television advertising all year interrupted periodically with a football game.

Six startups (Meebo, Meez, Multiply, Plaxo, RockYou and Technorati) who can’t afford the $2.5 million plus for a thirty second spot during the game got together to produce low-budget “SuperBowl” ads and put them on YouTube. Some of them are pretty entertaining. Others, not so much. We’ve embedded all of them below and have a poll to see which one you like the best.

By the way, last year’s real SuperBowl ads are still up on Google Video at video.google.com/superbowl.html. I assume Google will replace those ads with SuperBowl XLI ads tomorrow. Yahoo will also be hosting the actual SuperBowl ads once the games starts at Yahoo Video.

My favorite “startup” ad is Technorati, although they cheated by using footage from one of my favorite movies. Plaxo and Meebo are tied for second place.

The ads and poll are below, in this order: Meebo, Meez, Multiply, Plaxo, RockYou and Technorati:

Which startup SuperBowl Ad sucks the least?

Total Votes: 1038
Started: February 4, 2007

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