Barring an unexpected last minute change of heart, Anheuser-Busch's lineup of seven Super Bowl commercials is set and ready to go. In a follow-up conference call Tuesday with the media, A-B creative honcho Bob Lachky laid out the final selection of seven commercials totalling 4 minutes, 30 seconds of airtime. All but one of the spots were developed by DDB/Chicago. A seventh spot called "Generations," which talks about how the iconic Clydesdales made it to America, comes from the Waylon agency in St. Louis. A-B's Super Bowl mix includes two 60-second spots and five 30-second commercial.

Interestingly, the partial lineup of commercials Lachky unveiled a couple of weeks ago did not include a Bud Light spot called "Meeting," but it is now in the mix and slotted in the key post-kick-off slot. Though it is part of the new "Drinkability" campaign, "Meeting" looks and feels a lot more like one of the old-fashioned Bud Light spots, with a very blunt visual gag at the end. It's the kind of spot that doesn't require a lot of thought or reaction time. And it's not subtle, but that's pretty much what made most of the so-called old-fashioned Bud Light work so popular with Super Bowl viewers and others.

The "Generations" Clydesdale spot that is now solidly in the Super Bowl lineup has some nicely-wrought ad copy in it, but not all the efforts at visual humor work as well as they could. Hard to say whether "Generations" or "Circus," which recounts a Clydesdale romance in somewhat epic fashion, will prove the more popular of the three Clydesdale spots in the Super Bowl mix. For our money, however, the Bud Light spot with Conan O'Brien still is the best all-around Anheuser-Busch effort in this year's Super Bowl.