It’s not a Best Super Bowl Commercial of the Night contender, but Chevrolet’s Cruze Ad, “42 Wild Italians”, does manage to solve the problem of whether to advertise your product or make people laugh in a novel, vaguely meta way. The commercial begins with a typical Chevy/Tim Allen commercial touting the Cruze Eco’s 42 miles per gallon and then pulls back into a very tweedy nursing home, where the residents are unable to figure out quite what Allen wants to tell them. An immaculately dressed nurse(?) is unable to explain it to them but manages to get whatever else Allen might have told us into the ad.
My favorite Super Bowl ads remain the enormous, jokey productions—Audi’s new luxury prison is a good example—but this is a nice example of an ad that manages to be effective while delivering at least one laugh. “42 Wild Italians” is slightly more memorable, anyway, than 42 miles per gallon.
The video’s available now at the official Cruze website, while the rest of newly active GM’s Super Bowl ads can be spotted at this GM fansite.