Why Does the Super Bowl Suck?
For its fiftieth anniversary the Super Bowl decided to remind us how irrelevant it is. And I don't mean in a "Sports is stupid!" kinda way. Football, stupid or not, has a long way to go before the uncles of America will consider their favorite team inconsequential. No, it's the event itself and surrounding branding that couldn't be bothered to be halfway interesting to any audience. The never-ending fumbling on the field has nothing on the buttered melon fuckery that must have occurred in the planning sessions for the most expensive night of 2016 television.
The show, an overly long commercial for the NFL, demonstrated absolutely no attempt at cashing-in on the romance of the tradition. A sport that at all other times of the year spends gobs of money reminding us that it's *the* American game can only muster a parade of old fogeys and Chris Martin choking out... well, whatever that was. All the steam and bombast of the previous forty-nine concerts culminated into the limpest fart ever televised, so much so that you may consider revising any good memory you have of any halftime show ever. Come on Super Cool Super Bowl! It's your fiftieth anniversary and you get Coldplay?!? My mom recently turned fifty, and I'm pretty sure if Coldplay offered to play her birthday for free she'd still choose the Van Morrison mix CD I made her in 7th grade. Oh, me in 7th grade! Maybe that was the audience for the halftime show? Well, dammit, no, because the bright flowery decor, used by the directors as a tired nod to the San Franciscan backdrop, would have been lame to me even then.
But more on the halftime show in a minute. First let's establish that all of us Americans, no matter how socialist we find ourselves in 2016, have a tiny corner of our black hearts that still believes in nationalist bullshit. The Super Bowl. The Oscars. The Goddamn Pledge of Allegiance. These are things that even Bernie supporters can get drunk and enjoy. All it takes is a little emotional manipulation. We need sepia-tone footage of yesteryear. We need World War II vets in those leather helmets. All the likable parts of Ronald Reagan. Alternatively, you do the same, but modernized. I'm talking Norman Rockwell paintings with black people photoshopped in. Coca-Cola polar bears throwing a key party. All the gay parts of Nancy Reagan. It's actually pretty easy to get us tearing up over the stars and stripes and sports balls. In fact, Lady Gaga singing the National Anthem is a great step in the right direction. Unfortunately this was the only smart decision made during the entirety of pre-game.
Pop quiz: if you have a collection of fifty legends that you'd like to leverage for the nostalgia factor, what's the quickest way to screw it up? The correct answer is C: make them walk on turf that even virile cleat-clad players would find challenging. There was no greater reminder of the harsh impact that football has on a body than seeing fifty former Super Bowl stars Bambi their way across the field in what appeared to be a walkathon for the formerly concussed. Plus, there was no other media to flesh out the appearance of these haggard former players, no photos of them in their prime, no montage of archive footage... all we got was the relevant Super Bowl logo next to each veteran's name. Funnily enough, these logos would be the most exciting part of the Super Bowl for wannabe ad nerds, as the offering of commercials was nothing but a depressing demonstration of just how bad the best traditional marketing can be.
This decline of traditional advertising, on a long enough timeline, will kill the Super Bowl. Great commercials and a perceived obligation to our country are the only reasons non-fans tune in to the biggest night of TV, and last night's Super Bowl did nothing to remind us of either. Remember life before you could Netflix season two of Lost? Commercials were despised, but kind of in the same way oil spills are. Sure, they sucked, but they seemed a bit unavoidable and Cheers will be back on in two minutes anyway. The Super Bowl used to be the one night of the year when we all collectively gathered and decided to consider this capitalist junk food as theater. We treated the brands featured like presidential candidates and vocally voted which campaign spot was the most effective. These commercials were the cultural centerpiece of the most emotionally charged night of American television, which meant families with Clinton era levels of income would watch a kind of funny Budweiser commercial and rejoice. The next day they'd go to work and they'd talk in Budweiser. They'd say to their coworkers, "Budweiser?" and those coworkers would respond, "Budweiser!" Today Super Bowl commercials are thought to be a giant risk because they cost five million dollars and it's hard to measure their longterm effectivity, but this argument assumes their returns could be measured properly in the heyday. As far as I can tell, it simply didn't matter if Budweiser's post Super Bowl profit was actually quantifiable because having a successful commercial cemented your reputation as a cornerstone of American culture. Being in every fridge wasn't nearly as valuable as being in every mind, and the pedestal that the Super Bowl was put on assured your placement.
Now we live online, and seemingly brands spend five million dollars just to put "Super Bowl Commercial" in their Youtube descriptions. Almost every spot from last night was available the week prior, so when puppymonkeybaby showed up around the second quarter, all the potential consumers for Mtn Dew (ugh) Kickstart had already seen the commercial. Whatever comments one could make concerning the lack of effectivity due to quality (it has all the randomness of a scene kid circa 2004) are a shadow of the brand's own critique when they put their several million dollar spot on the internet for totally free. In an era where every spot is a knock off of the Old Spice sensibility, the only possibility for manipulation these brands have relies on the romance of the Super Bowl itself, and you don't even have to tune in to watch them. Hey, quick pro-tip for every brand online, just say your commercial is a Super Bowl commercial! No one can do anything about it! Even better, claim that it was rejected even though you never submitted it! Edgy!
Maybe it doesn't matter if a brand waits to show its spots though, because that Super Bowl nostalgia, the golden glow that even we sarcastic assholes give to all American traditions, is dimming rapidly. The game's 50th anniversary is the perfect chance to reignite this flame, and the best stab made by the NFL at doing so was their Super Bowl babies spot which lasted all of thirty seconds of a three and a half hour broadcast. That's 755970 seconds of missed opportunity. Even if you, the NFL show runners, can't figure out a way to demonstrate your sport's value during the game (you can, by the way), you have the most watched thirty minutes of televised entertainment at your disposal. The NFL should've spent the entirety of the halftime show reminding America of the timelessness of the Super Bowl tradition. Instead, we were reaffirmed that Beyonce is far more important to American culture than the Super Bowl can ever hope to be again.
In fact, one can just look to the Formation video for an example of a better way of handling the half-time show. Sure, as the NFL you can't touch on the more activist aspects of what Beyonce and her creative team are saying with Formation, but you are an institution with mostly black athletes. You have existed and evolved with America through an ongoing civil rights movement. You were many white Americans first embrace of black individuals, even if you have immorally handled this responsibility since its inception. How could you possibly misuse this opportunity to show off a rich history and align yourself with the future of American society? I wouldn't expect the choice to be a high-minded one either. Even if you're proclivity towards paper is the only thing driving your brand, you have to recognize that you could very easily slate yourself as the one binding agent for Americans of all creeds, colors, and political leanings, which is a very profitable place to be indeed.
Instead, we got a loose attempt at some sort of togetherness narrative with a flower child theme, which proved a far less powerful interpretation of the inclusion message than Beyonce's very specific New Orleans homage. You can see this broken logic with the Coldplay choice. They're one of the last airy acts to fill stadiums based on heartstrings alone, so surely they can drive home this Haight-Ashbury mentality of unity. No! Coldplay is generic, not universal, a far cry from the messaging of the movement that you're trying to encapsulate. In fact, Bruce Springsteen, who you cut to for five seconds, could've communicated this far more readily with Born to Run, which, while anthemic, has all the bittersweet properties of modern American pride, and at least has the same crippled nostalgia factor as your brand. Instead, Bruno Mars was there, performing a meme that we're all burnt out on, going a long way in proving that there's nothing less relevant than trying to prove you're relevant. You'd almost think the NFL flat-out forgot their fiftieth anniversary if it weren't for an eight-second long "medley" in which Chris Martin just sang three lines from other half-time performers. It was so brief in fact, that one wonders if the people working the booth were caught off guard. One can imagine a producer in a panic. "Oh shit, he's doing like a tribute thing! Quick, run whatever half-time archive footage we have!"
I don't cling to many traditions. I don't dress up for Halloween. I drink as much on St. Patricks day as I do all the other days. And my idea of a Super Bowl Sunday is making the trek to the burbs to hang out with my mom. But as a small time copywriter and longtime television geek, I would hope that the ad nerd amateur hour that is the Super Bowl would at least show me what the big boys are doing. Give me a great example of what multi-million dollar institutions can do with the biggest single American audience of the year. Instead, I got a handy map of the minefield that is B2C communication and, more importantly, a reminder of why this generic, white-washed version of the American dream is giving way to logic. I guess it's time to finally make the leap and pretend I like soccer instead.
