Favorite Olympic Commercials

We’ve been watching an unusually large amount of TV lately thanks to the Olympics. We probably haven’t watched this much since the last Olympics, and typically when we do watch television it’s either online or via our Roku, so it is pretty much all commercial free. I’m not complaining about missing commercials, but since they’re more of a novelty to me now, it has been fun to watch the ads during the Olympic coverage, which have been pretty good with the exception of a few local, low-budget spots and the horrifying Grimm TV show ads that are totally giving my girls nightmares (please stop airing them during the day NBC!)

It also helps that marketing/communication was Aimée and my career specialties in our pre-mom days, so we appreciate good branding when we see it. We’ve been so impressed by a few of the commercials that we wanted to share our favorites. Here are our Olympic Commercial Medalists:

:: GOLD goes to Proctor & Gamble for their “Kids 2012” commercial that says, “To us, they’re Olympians. But to their moms, they’ll always be kids.” How can you not get choked up watching this?

:: SILVER goes to AT&T for their ad featuring U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte, “Luck Didn’t Get me to London, I Swam Here.” The imagery and message to this ad are unarguably epic.

:: BRONZE goes to Chevrolet for their “Like Father, Like Son” ad. As any mom can attest, the adorable scene of a young boy playing trucks in the living room is straight out of real life, and I just love the look on the boy’s face when he hears his dad’s truck door close, “Dad’s Home!” It’s so true to life — my kids have such sharp hearing, I swear they can hear our back door shut from anywhere in the house. I also love this ad from Chevy.

I have to feel sorry for the 4th-place finishers in all of the Olympic events — usually finishing just tenths of a second behind the winners but sent home empty handed. So I couldn’t resist mentioning my 4th-favorite commercial from Pizza Hut. It doesn’t have anything to do with the Olympics, but as parents of three girls, my husband and I thought it was SUPER funny.

So has your family been watching a lot of Olympics? Which of the ads is your gold-medal favorite??