The nominees for best advertising during a live broadcast are: Living Social with “We’ll Set The Stage. You Play The Part, Act 1” and Miracle Whip with “Take A Side”. With each company competing for attention over their well-known competitors, they turned to innovation to strengthen their brands.

While some may feel that Miracle Whip is bordering on insane, others – myself included, see their ad as honest and refreshing. Living Social seems to be winning the advertising war between themselves and Groupon given the latter’s latest ad gaffe.

Twitter commentary around Living Social ads included some of the following:

@Brainzooming Mike Brown
LivingSocial ad looks like how music videos were done in 1982. #JustSayin #OscarEXP #Oscars

@JimJosephExp Jim Joseph
LivingSocial giving Groupon a run for their money? #OscarExp

Comments on YouTube videos are usually taken very lightly, however three comments offer interesting insight into this self-deprecating ad campaign:

this is a dumb commercial, it sho[w]s people who [don’t] like it.

You gotta hand it to ’em. They’ve produced a commercial with most of the people describing how awful their product is. Yuckola.

Too much fun and simply well done on the production. I like how it didn’t come off as a bunch of standard casted corny commercial actors (like those in ads for pharmaceutical products). I have always been a MW fan and its nice to know they have a good sense of humor to match. SPREADABLE DISAPPOINTMENT!! — ROTGL!!

Do you have a winning ad of the evening?