The Super Bowl and self-indulgence

It's Super Bowl Sunday and the game is over. Now come days of evaluation, Monday-morning quarterbacking, tough questions and cliche answers. We'll hear all about it on the morning talk shows and entire magazines will be dedicated to what happened today.

And I'm not even talking about football.

I'm talking about where the real money gets spent. Advertising.

In fact, those of us in the advertising industry have it worse than the chronic sports fans out there. At least they had a fake college football championship to argue over and some legitimate NFL playoffs to watch in January. Those of us in the advertising industry roll right into the Super Bowl season as soon as the figures come out on holiday retail traffic.

It's positively pathetic. The first Super Bowl related news stories broke as early as November 30, 2004. And the drumbeat just keeps getting louder until the day of the big game. But why do we put so much importance on this event?

You have to understand the history of the Super Bowl to really appreciate it, I suppose. The Super Bowl is an interesting cultural phenomenon because for the first thirty or so years, it wasn't really that fun to watch. The games were generally boring and the outcomes fairly easy to predict. As a result, we had to rely on something else to keep us entertained. After all, it was cold outside and this was our last, official glimpse of the "true" national pastime until next fall.

Then Apple Computer, Ridley Scott and Chiat/Day changed it all. They introduced a new concept to us in a way that had tongues wagging for weeks. 1984 presented the Macintosh computer to us in a dramatic, arresting presentation that literally stopped conversations about the non-game going on that evening. From that point forward, the bar kept getting raised. The ads were fun to watch (none as interesting as the Apple spot, but still enjoyable) and the games remained boring.

This went on for ten to fifteen years - that's nearly a lifetime in advertising years - and was assumed (at least by our industry) to be the way things were meant to be. Then, all of a sudden, the NFL had the audacity to put teams into the Super Bowl that actually played a game worth watching. Tonight's game was one of them.

Imagine the nerve of these people. Just who do they think they are? Interrupting the flow of the ads with their petty game playing during the breaks. I just don't get it.

Truth be told, I'm glad the game is there. The ads on the Super Bowl have been pretty dreadful the last few years. This year, the hyperbole has been the worst I can remember. We've even had advertisers who have tried to gain the spotlight by not running ads in the Super Bowl (Budweiser's Janet Jackson ad comes to mind as well as the sophomoric attempt by Miller Beer to pick yet another fight with A-B).

As for the ads that ran in the game, I personally enjoyed the Ameriquest spots (but I'm a little twisted), the Budweiser Clydesdale spots and some of the Cadillac work. Most of the spots were pretty average or below average. And the spots for Go Daddy, Subway and Lays made me wince with their badness. Leonard Pinth-Garnell would have been very please. They were truly bad.

Let's get past this nonsense and on with the business of making ads.

Later.

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