This was fun: I made my All Things Considered debut today, talking about the two Quartz stories I wrote on the Super Bowl ads (before and after). Thanks for the great chat, Audie Cornish!

If you missed the interview, you can listen to it here:

Or you can find it on NPR’s site here.

Nationwide Has a Hit and a Miss with Super Bowl Ads

The post All Things Considered: Nationwide Has a Hit and a Miss with Super Bowl Ads appeared first on TV & Not TV.

The Patriots beat the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX, but as I wrote at Quartz, in the battle that matters most for many of the game’s 100 million-plus viewers — the content for the best Super Bowl ad — the winner and loser turned out to be the very same company: Nationwide.

First, they unveiled “Invisible Mindy Kaling,” which was easily the night’s best, and funniest ad:

But shortly after that, they put out “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” which ends with a Debbie Downer-worthy stunner of a twist:

 As I wrote,

What. The. Hell? Cue virtual record scratches around the country, as jaws dropped and the merriment was instantly sucked out of Super Bowl parties from coast to coast. Meanwhile, some of us were suddenly forced to have very awkward conversations with our kids about what had just occurred onscreen. “Daddy, did that boy drown in the bathtub… or was he crushed under that TV?” was certainly not a question I was expecting to field from my stunned kids during the Super Bowl.

Well THAT was a conversation I wasn’t expecting to have with my kids right now. Thanks, Nationwide.

— Jason Lynch (@jasonlynch) February 2, 2015

And that was just one of many morose ads that turned this into the feel-bad Super Bowl of my lifetime. Ugh!

The same company put out the best and worst Super Bowl ads this year

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