Tag: NFL

Fetishizing of Super Bowl ads

Seth Anderson0 comment

Gordon's crisp Potato Sticks
Gordon’s crisp Potato Sticks

Amusingly, Phil Rosenthal agrees with me re: Super Bowl ads being over-rated.1

It’s not Super Bowl commercials I mind. I’ve actually liked a lot of them. I’ve enjoyed disliking others. My objection is how they’ve become fetishized.

Though they sell beer, cars, junk food and sundry other everyday items, services and ideas, we’ve been conditioned to treat them as something between objets d’art and Adam Sandler comedies.

Perhaps adored, perhaps abhorred, they’re tough to completely ignore.

It’s as if the fact that some marketer spent $5 million per half minute — up about 11 percent from $4.5 million last year — to pitch more than 100 million of us in the Super Bowl 50 audience obliges us to actually pay attention.

That attention, as reliable as the way we always dote on anthropomorphic animals year after year, in turn, helps justify the $166,666.67-per-second price, production costs not included.

…

Somewhere along the line, someone — maybe Don Draper, maybe Darrin Stephens — pitched Americans on the idea that television commercials are as much a part of Super Bowl Sunday as the game itself, and we bought it.

The queasy feeling that too many salty, fatty foodstuffs bring by the third quarter is as much a part of Super Bowl Sunday as the game too. But we’re not carpet-bombed with previews and reviews, encouraged to experience it repeatedly before and after the game and invited to try an extended and more intense version.

(click here to continue reading Fetishizing of Super Bowl ads: How much is too much? – Chicago Tribune.)

Doped Youth
Doped Youth

Should we be impressed by advertising just because it costs a lot to air? And create? Especially since so few ads are even worthy of our attention. Some are even worth our disgust, like:

The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse (NCADA) is hitting us again at the Super Bowl. This time with “All American Girl” – an ad that’s supposed to show that you should care about heroin abuse because it affects pretty white girls, too.

But, of course, the ad then doesn’t show what you do when someone is having a problem with heroin – it lets them just wander off in the distance. No, this is just another one of those frying-pan scared-straight attempts at prevention that have been shown historically to not work.

(click here to continue reading Another SuperBad Advertisement « Drug WarRant.)

Footnotes:
  1. and for the record, I didn’t read this essay until just now [↩]

Super Bowl Ads Are Boring

Seth Anderson0 comment

Vintage Asahi Beer Ad (Ramen Takeya)
Vintage Asahi Beer Ad (Ramen Takeya)

Once a year, non-sports fans are encouraged to watch the Super Bowl despite not caring a whit who is playing. The reason? The advertising is supposed to be of elevated quality. 

For instance, one of the most famous Super Bowl ads is the Apple Computer 1984 ad announcing the Macintosh:

Billy Jeans
Billy Jeans

John Ellis Bush! Bush is allegedly going to show his brother’s supportive ad during Super Bowl L:

Former President George W. Bush has cut a TV ad for the super PAC supporting his brother, marking the former president’s most public political activity in the campaign to date.

(click here to continue reading Exclusive: George W. Bush cuts television ad backing his brother – POLITICO.)

Great Price's (sic)
Great Price’s (sic)

Having sat through many boring football games to watch the ads, I’m not falling for it again. I’m not convinced that simply because something is expensive, it is good. The decline of Hollywood as a conduit of interesting films could arguably be dated from the time that box office numbers became the metric of whether a given movie was any good. Plot, character development, those became less important than having great special effects, and thus most films made today are superhero films, animated dross, or similar genres.

One Eye to Rule Them

One Eye to Rule Them

CBS already has the 2016 Super Bowl Commercials website up, so if there is something really interesting shown, you can go and spend your time watching beer, auto, pharmaceutical corporations trying to sell you their products. I wouldn’t say that advertising can never be clever, just that the typical target for Super Bowl ads seems to be 14 year old boys: the commercials are populated with fast cars, women with “child-bearing hips”, and puerile and jejune scenarios. Many ads seem solely as crass attempts at creating a “viral” sensation, or at least stirring up controversy. Alcohol, sugary sodas, packaged snacks, fast food, cars, software, electronics, probably some insurance company; am I missing anything by resisting their pitches? Doubtful.

If you are a football fan, by all means, watch the culmination of the season. For the rest of us, go for a walk or something.

Parenthetically, I’m amused that the NFL is not using the Roman numeral for 50, “L”, but only for this year.

You don’t have to brush up on your Roman numerals because it’s not going to be Super Bowl L for a few reasons. At the top of the list: Nobody wants to be associated with a loser. Especially the NFL.

“Some would ask, ‘The letter L, what does that associate with?'” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy says.

The answer, of course, is “Losing.”

Football is a game of X’s and O’s. But it’s also long been one of I’s and V’s, as virtually the only institution in our society that incorporates Roman numerals. Roughly a decade ago, the NFL first began examining what “Super Bowl L” looked like on social media, on mobile devices and on merchandise like T-shirts and caps. The short answer? It didn’t look good.

Using the number 50 was found to be much more appealing than an L, on many levels, from the negativity associated with losing to the aesthetic challenges posed by using the letter. So this year, and this year only, the Super Bowl will use more traditional numbering.

“The genesis is with Super Bowl XL 10 years ago,” McCarthy says. “We spent some time looking at what a block L would look like on its own, and [NFL Creative Services] said, ‘It could be a problem from a creative and design element that the letter L, on its own, without an I after it, looks unusual within the design world.'”

(click here to continue reading What the L? Why the NFL Sacked Roman Numerals for Super Bowl 50 | Rolling Stone.)