Sex Sells: The Abso#$%ingly Best Car Ads Of The Super Bowl

Bertel Schmitt
by Bertel Schmitt

So what was the best Super Bowl ad yesterday? Edmunds has the answer: It’s the commercial for the Fiat 500.

The alluring advert must have touched the inner submissive in America’s men. They are shown an ad where a dork is slapped around by an (allegedly) Italian beauty with an Abarth tattoo (on her neck,) and they obligingly click it to the top of the charts, without even thinking of hissing: “On your knees, Ffffffffiat.”

Wimps.

Of course, it could also have been American females who had their inner dominatrix tickled. Thankfully, we won’t know. Edmunds measured the effectiveness of Super Bowl car ads by monitoring the traffic on the respective pages on Edmunds.com, before, during, and after the ads ran, and clicks are gender neutral.

Edmunds measured whether these ads actually aroused something more than prurient interest – do people want to know more about the car? From a pile of data emailed by Edmunds, we give you the overall cumulative results.

That old Fiat ad that had been around since November last year, but hey, sex never gets old, only we do. The Fiat 500 ad made the top spot by increasing traffic at Edmunds by 138 percent.

Bertel Schmitt
Bertel Schmitt

Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.

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  • Geeded Geeded on Feb 06, 2012

    The Fiat Abarth was my favorite by a country mile. It said to me, "You will Love/Lust after this car and it will NEVER be boring! Second, Dorito Cat ad Third would have been the Ferris Bueller ad but once you've seen the extended ad online, the one on the Superbowl was a dud. Cheer and as always, YMMV

  • Kericf Kericf on Feb 06, 2012

    Best was the kia dreamland one. I guess for the optima. Granted the car really wasn't that cool but the commercial was funny.

  • Kryptonzone Kryptonzone on Feb 07, 2012

    Wow, that FIAT ad is old. So they decided to recycle it huh? Seen the Chrysler ad with Clint? http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/06/politics/eastwood-ad-politics/index.html?hpt=hp_c1 The Toyota Camry Reinvented one was good too. Love to have a blender blasting out Lionel's "All night long", all night.

  • Dashti Dashti on Feb 25, 2012

    Nobody talks about the car performance, that what i want to see in the ad.

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