Super Bowl Ads Disappoint

For those viewers hoping for exciting, high-quality performances in the Super Bowl Sunday night, the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers delivered in thrilling style.

But, for those more interested in the advertisements than the football, the results were more disappointing, Stuart Elliott writes in The Times. The commercials, he says, “fell back on familiar strategies and themes” that would have been more appropriate for the Eisenhower administration, with a joke about a mother-in-law, a gag about the word panties and an ad set at a prom, among others. It was a missed opportunity for marketers, Mr. Elliott writes.