Detroit Free Press

DETROIT – Big celebrities and zany animals ruled Super Bowl XL commercials as the year’s biggest night of television watching began – but the products were the real stars.

This year, advertisers actually focused ads on their products and services, using animals and celebrities in supporting roles – sometimes putting them completely in the background with little fanfare.

Humorous Super Bowl TV ad spots from Cadillac, Aleve, Diet Pepsi, ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” TV series, Careerbuilder.com and Anheuser Busch’s Bud Light used everything from big-name stars such as hip-hopper Diddy and boxing legend Sugar Ray Leonard to booty-shaking sheep and wacky chimpanzees to make people bust a gut laughing. The point of the ads was to get people chuckling so much so that they’d talk about the ads long after they air. Most important, advertisers wanted their commercials to be so creative or over the top that they dominate this morning’s water-cooler conversation at offices across the country.

Super Bowl is one of the few times a year advertisers get to shine: It’s the one time many consumers who increasingly zap past commercials using digital-video recorders will actually use those high-tech gadgets to watch funny ads over and over again.

This year, the stakes were unbelievably high for advertisers. A 30-second spot came with the hefty price tag of an estimated $2.5 million, up from $2.4 million last year.

So Super Bowl XL advertisers tried to get their money’s worth.

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(c) 2006, Detroit Free Press.

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AP-NY-02-05-06 2220EST