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Martin wades into abortion debateAs the Dáil committee hearings continue on the abortion bill, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has waded into the debate saying it is important that Christian believers "be, and seen to be, on the side of life, especially when life is most vulnerable".
Payment cuts see families pay rent shortfallLimits on rent supplement payments set by the Government are forcing thousands of families to make undeclared top-up payments to landlords to secure places to live.
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Anger as North Korea launches another missileNorth Korea fired a short-range missile from its east coast, a day after launching three more of these missiles, a South Korean news agency said.
How Star Trek predicted the futureWHEN Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry first dreamed up the concept of a television show based in the unexplored universe of Outer Space in 1964, the world was a very different place.
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Warnings over future of eurozoneThe eurozone is heading towards a break up unless there are moves towards much closer political and fiscal union, according to chief economist with State Street Global Advisers, Chris Probyn.
Bruton defends corporate tax rateIreland will be able to maintain its current corporation tax code in the face of international pressure to prevent multinational corporations avoid paying their fare share of tax, Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Richard Bruton said yesterday.
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Mayo’s statement of intentGalway 0-11 Mayo 4-16 Five minutes to go in Salthill yesterday and James Horan was still cajoling his men to sew it into Galway.
Wilkinson inspires Toulon to gloryASM Clermont Auvergne 15 Toulon 16 Not for the first time this season, a matchday performance and the result have made a mockery of the statistics.
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What Lenny did nextLENNY Abrahamson has directed three feature films: Adam & Paul, Garage and What Richard Did.
Clothes maketh you madTrying on clothes, said Ewart, produced "sensations which bring deep peace and perfect contentment" to the female mind.
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Sentimental and weepy... and that was just the ads
Unabashed sentimentality took the unofficial Super Bowl trophy for advertising brilliance, with draft horses and pickup trucks both putting a lump in America’s collective throat.
By Robert MacPherson
Budweiser’s touching pocket narrative of an equine farmer reunited on the streets of Chicago with the Clydesdale he nurtured from birth for the beer’s signature draft horse team was a run-away hit with viewers and critics alike. New York ad agency Anomaly married the heartwarming imagery with Fleetwood Mac’s sorrowful Landslide for the 60-second spot that went to invite a real-life newborn Budweiser foal via the brewer’s Twitter account.
USA Today said the Budweiser ad took first place in its online reader-voted Ad Meter survey of Super Bowl commercials.
“Weepy, sentimental, nostalgic,” wrote Kim Wheaton of Advertising Age in an instant analysis of the night’s 50-plus commercials on the industry journal’s website (www.adage.com).
“I don’t care. This is everything I want from a Budweiser Super Bowl spot.”
Viewers were still going onto Twitter to admit to shedding tears when Ram, the pickup division of Chrysler, weighed in a few minutes after Budweiser with a solemn ode to rural America created by Texas ad agency Richards Group.
It married spectacular photography of the Great Plains with late conservative broadcaster Paul Harvey’s 1978 essay ‘So God Made a Farmer’ — and never revealed until the final few seconds that it was selling a truck.
Patriotism figured in another Chrysler spot, this time for Jeep, that celebrated the homecoming of American soldiers from Afghanistan.
The Super Bowl is the single most watched event on US television, easily pulling in more than 100m viewers, and this year CBS was selling 30 seconds of ad time for as much as $3.8m (€2.8m).
“This is the ultimate spectacle of sports,” said Andrew Billings, director of the University of Alabama Program in Sports Communication. “This is the pinnacle of the ads industry.”
But big-budget advertisers’ best-laid plans to generate and sustain social media buzz got waylaid by the 34-minute partial blackout that hit the Superdome in New Orleans in the third quarter of the game.
That freak incident got people tweeting about the blackout instead of the ads, although Oreo made the most of the moment with an Instagram of its iconic cookie and the slogan: “You can still dunk in the dark.”
While Pepsi indulged in the luxury of its spokeswoman Beyonce performing the half-time show, Coca-Cola invited viewers to go online and select the ending of its commercial, a Technicolor race through the desert for a bottle of Coke.
The winner climax — the bus-driving showgirls in pink won out over the cowboys and the bikers — was aired just minutes after the Baltimore Ravens’ victory over the San Francisco 49s.
Many of the ads were released in the days leading up to the Super Bowl, including one from Volkswagen that some thought “racist” for depicting a cheerful Beetle-driving white office worker speaking in a Jamaican accent.
With Apple sitting out this year’s game, the field was clear for Samsung, its arch rival in the smartphone market, to declare itself “the next big thing” with wise-cracking Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd plus a LeBron James cameo.
SodaStream, which makes a home carbonation system, generated hefty publicity for a spot that didn’t even make it to the big game. It issued a statement that CBS rejected its original Super Bowl commercial showing bottles of Coke and Pepsi, two of the game’s biggest sponsors, combusting spontaneously as they were being delivered to a store as someone used a SodaStream product.