If you want to truly understand the soul of America, start with the Super Bowl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(Hold it! The game isn\u2019t for two more weeks, why are we discussing this today? Hold that thought\u2026)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/em>; 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 \u2013 the standard play-clock allowance \u2013 OR for 25 seconds \u2013 after a change in possession, a time-out, a two-minute warning, or at the start of a new quarter \u2013 OR for 10 seconds \u2013 if a team commits any number of fouls within the two-minute warning. Tick, tick, tick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And when a play does<\/em> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And when there is<\/em> a full stop in the action, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And on Super Bowl Sunday, everything is\u2026well\u2026super-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\u2026of which we watch about 11 minutes of action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s 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\u2019d recently brought to his movies \u2018Alien\u2019 and \u2018Blade Runner\u2019 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\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2026the result wasn\u2019t 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, \u20181984,\u2019 even if they couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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 \u2018brand affinity,\u2019 or \u2018recall,\u2019 or \u2018persuasion,\u2019 or \u2018intent to purchase.\u2019 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 \u2018product sell\u2019 into a garish land of frogs and Clydesdales, famous celebrities, CGI monstrosities, internet tie-ins, and nothing but net.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No wonder that the entire broadcast has gotten increasingly bloated, more shocking-to-the-senses, and \u2013 in today\u2019s environment \u2013 more culturally charged than ever before. And this week comes a couple of announcements that kick off this year\u2019s run-up to the festivities. The NFL has decided that the national anthem will be sung by Chris Stapleton \u2013 a country-rock favorite who also enigmatically supports Black Lives Matter \u2013 followed by Cheryl Lee Ralph performing, \u2018Lift Every Voice and Sing,\u2019 and Babyface singing \u2018America the Beautiful.\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I\u2019m keeping an eye on a particular advertiser. Back in October, M&M\u2019s added a new Purple character to their colorful troop, a sassy peanut with \u201ckeen self-awareness, authenticity and confidence,\u201d as per the press release. And since she is an icon of diversity and inclusion, it wasn\u2019t long before Tucker Carlson went ballistic. Among other complaints, he said, \u201cM&M\u2019s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous\u2014until the moment you wouldn\u2019t want to have a drink with any one of them. That\u2019s the goal. When you\u2019re totally turned off, we\u2019ve achieved equity. They\u2019ve won.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In response, this week, right before the Super Bowl<\/em>, M&M\u2019s made this concession: \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hmm\u2026maybe it\u2019s me\u2026but I\u2019m sensing a colorful chocolate punk. Will the most popular confection brand in America really discard decades of marketing equity to assuage one critic? I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe, maybe not. But rest assured, regardless of the score, something shocking is coming\u2026and the broadcast will be\u2026entertaining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We have entered the Super Silly Season, when American marketers run amok. Stay tuned. Game on. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you want to truly understand the soul of America, start with the Super Bowl. (Hold it! The game isn\u2019t for two more weeks, why are we discussing this today? Hold that thought\u2026) As everybody knows, the length of a football game is 60 minutes. And most of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1834,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/1984.png?fit=1280%2C720&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1833"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1835,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions\/1835"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}