If you want to truly understand the soul of America, start with the Super Bowl.

     (Hold it! The game isn’t for two more weeks, why are we discussing this today? Hold that thought…)

     As everybody knows, the length of a football game is 60 minutes. And most of the time that the game is going on, the game is truly going on; more often than not a play ends with a tackle in-bounds, which means that the clock just keeps on ticking. It can run for a long time before the next play gets underway, as long as 40 seconds – the standard play-clock allowance – OR for 25 seconds – after a change in possession, a time-out, a two-minute warning, or at the start of a new quarter – OR for 10 seconds – if a team commits any number of fouls within the two-minute warning. Tick, tick, tick.

     And when a play does get underway, it only lasts about 4 seconds, on average. Which means, by the end of the game, if you add up all the play time, there’s only about 11 minutes of actual competition. In between all those short little plays, an average broadcast spends about 75 minutes showing the players walking around getting set for the next play, and 17 minutes showing video reviews and replays.

     And when there is a full stop in the action, it’s time for a word from our sponsors. The average football game has about 20 commercial breaks, with an average of 100 total advertisements, which taken together run for about an hour, approximately one-third of the total broadcast.

     And on Super Bowl Sunday, everything is…well…super-sized. The halftime show tacks on at least another 30 minutes of entertainment and marketing, which blows up the total run-time to almost 4 hours. And if you count the pregame prognostication and postgame pontification, it all adds up to a total broadcast of about 7 hours…of which we watch about 11 minutes of action.

     That’s not a lot of game, but a lot of commercial opportunity. Which was leveraged to amazing effect back in 1984, when a little computer company called Apple came up with a radical commercial idea about an attractive female athlete destroying a huge television monitor with a flying sledgehammer. They turned to a film director named Ridley Scott, and asked him to apply the same futuristic vision he’d recently brought to his movies ‘Alien’ and ‘Blade Runner’ to their commercial. And they aired that ad only once, in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, when the Raiders were blowing out the Redskins and most viewers were starting to glaze over…

…the result wasn’t just a shattering of that monitor, but of the entire Super Bowl status quo. The next day fewer people were talking about the results of the boring game than about that insane ad, ‘1984,’ even if they couldn’t quite tell you what it meant. Lots of advertisers noticed, and by the following year, a lot of Madison Avenue shops were looking for inventive and shocking ways to get that kind of attention.

     By 1989, USA Today realized that more people were watching the game for the promos than for the pigskin, and they launched a feature called AdMeter. It’s a viewer ranking of all the advertisements on the broadcast. Notably, the commercials were judged solely on their entertainment value, as opposed to more classic marketing assessments such as ‘brand affinity,’ or ‘recall,’ or ‘persuasion,’ or ‘intent to purchase.’ But no matter, since the rankings appeared on the front page of the most noteworthy national newspaper, on the Monday morning after the game, it quickly became the quasi-official industry scoreboard. From that point forward, the Super Bowl commercial landscape transformed from ‘product sell’ into a garish land of frogs and Clydesdales, famous celebrities, CGI monstrosities, internet tie-ins, and nothing but net.

     No wonder that the entire broadcast has gotten increasingly bloated, more shocking-to-the-senses, and – in today’s environment – more culturally charged than ever before. And this week comes a couple of announcements that kick off this year’s run-up to the festivities. The NFL has decided that the national anthem will be sung by Chris Stapleton – a country-rock favorite who also enigmatically supports Black Lives Matter – followed by Cheryl Lee Ralph performing, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’ and Babyface singing ‘America the Beautiful.’ The halftime show will be led by Rihanna, perhaps the raciest mainstream performer in the industry, who will also be launching her new clothing line, in some sort of @badgirlriri kind of way.

     But I’m keeping an eye on a particular advertiser. Back in October, M&M’s added a new Purple character to their colorful troop, a sassy peanut with “keen self-awareness, authenticity and confidence,” as per the press release. And since she is an icon of diversity and inclusion, it wasn’t long before Tucker Carlson went ballistic. Among other complaints, he said, “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous—until the moment you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them. That’s the goal. When you’re totally turned off, we’ve achieved equity. They’ve won.”

     In response, this week, right before the Super Bowl, M&M’s made this concession: “We have decided to take an indefinite pause from the spokecandies. In their place, we are proud to introduce a spokesperson America can agree on: the beloved Maya Rudolph. We are confident that Ms. Rudolph will champion the power of fun to create a world where everyone feels they belong.”

     Hmm…maybe it’s me…but I’m sensing a colorful chocolate punk. Will the most popular confection brand in America really discard decades of marketing equity to assuage one critic? I’m holding out that Maya might show up hand-in-hand with Purple. And given a big enough sponsorship, Rihanna could grind with Green. And, what the heck, why not have Red and Yellow deliberate the video challenges? After all, very few of us really care who wins the game.

     Maybe, maybe not. But rest assured, regardless of the score, something shocking is coming…and the broadcast will be…entertaining.

     We have entered the Super Silly Season, when American marketers run amok. Stay tuned. Game on.