super bowl commercials suck now
taylor swift isn’t tainting the big game, but the internet sure is.
I like sports. I also understand that some people, including other members of the rat.house ratitorial team, don’t. (For the record, the rats in question are not pretentious or grating.)
Pretentious, grating assholes frequently dismiss sports fandom as a whole — see: “sportsball,” which has luckily already long been taken down by writers much smarter than me. Holier-than-thou sports haters can kick rocks, but ultimately, a respectful divergence in taste is not a problem for this football-loving meathead.
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s apathetic toward sports tuning into, say, the Stanley Cup Finals. But the Big Game is an Event, even for those who earnestly believe that Taylor Swift put Travis Kelce on the map.
A quick Etsy search of “Super Bowl shirt” this week netted many results that had nothing to do with the Kansas City Chiefs or San Francisco 49ers. For those who simply don’t care, there are a myriad of options available to express indifference to, you know, the actual football of it all. Taylor Swift! Halftime! Alcohol! Most of these are, unfortunately, but perhaps unsurprisingly, marketed toward women. But don’t worry, men: If you don’t care about the game but do care about your crippling gambling addiction, there are options out there for you too.
And oh, yeah, a lot of shirts mention the commercials.
For the sports agnostic, Super Bowl commercials have always been the way to engage with the game without actually engaging with the game. Sure, Super Bowl XLII featured David Tyree’s famous Helmet Catch, but is that play as iconic as E-Trade’s “Talking Baby”? The jury is out! And who could forget GoDaddy’s “Spot On” ad, which drew two million (presumably horny) users to the brand’s website that same year? (I was not among those visitors, though 12-year-old me was already a lesbian and more-than-presumably horny.)
I highly recommend doing a deep dive into Ad Age’s Super Bowl Ad Archive, which paints an interesting picture of how advertising philosophy has shifted over time.
Some takeaways, just for fun:
In 1996 — the year of my birth and, more importantly, the Year of the Rat — 30 seconds of ad time cost an average of $1.085 million.
The dot-com boom largely influenced Super Bowl XXXIV’s ads. Fourteen different dot-com companies ran advertisements, paying an average of $2.1 million for a 30-second spot. Three of those companies folded before the end of 2000.
Crypto was pushed HARD in 2022 (including in this ad for the now-defunct FTX). And then … nothing! Crypto ads were nowhere to be found during Super Bowl LVII. There are none expected during Super Bowl LVIII either.
The internet, and broader advancements in technology, have always informed Super Bowl marketing. Additionally, commercials have always served as a fun way to entertain both sports lovers and sports agnostics during the Big Game. Despite these observations, I have some devastating news to share: The internet has made Super Bowl commercials worse.
Yeah, you heard me.
What prompted this thought experiment was Paramount+’s release of its nearly two-minute Super Bowl spot. Apparently, 30-second spots for this year’s game cost an average of $7 million. I’m not good at math, but I reckon that means this particular ad cost, well, more than that! (The game is airing on CBS this year, so maybe there’s some kind of in-house discount.)
To borrow a phrase from my friend Kara, there is “an MCU for commercials” nowadays. You’re not just being pushed a product, you’re being pushed a story; a story that often requires broader outside knowledge of pop culture, celebrities, and internet humor. We’re no longer content with talking frogs and iconic horses — instead, give us an actual MCU tie-in with fucking Ant-Man.
Paramount+’s bloated spot, an extension of its “Mountain of Entertainment” cinematic universe, is, admittedly, quite funny. Or at least it’s funny to me. But it also has two key features that I think are tainting Super Bowl ads as a whole:
It was released before the Super Bowl. What’s the point? Isn’t the whole idea to woo captive audiences? Why am I seeing it on Twitter days beforehand?
It assumes that everyone is as online as I am. No offense to the great people of Missouri, but do we think the average Chiefs fan is going to vibe with this commercial?
The icing on this chronically online cake is the inclusion of Creed, whose performance of “Higher” is — in itself — a meme thanks to a now-viral performance the band did back in 2001. I ask you, my ratlings: Who the fuck is this commercial for? Is it just for me? Because, honestly, the only thing that would make this more up my alley is if the cast of Yellowjackets came out and cannibalized Sir Patrick Stewart. (Hit me up for more ideas, Paramount! I need a full-time job!)
Content is certainly an issue, but my main gripe is with the way that these commercials are rolled out. Like any other television lover, I would go feral for a show directed by Taika Waititi and starring Quinta Brunson — but why is TurboTax teasing a commercial collaboration between the two of them like it’s the must-watch event of the season? Uber Eats is not only banking on the assumption that you’ve seen Netflix’s Beckham series, it also wants you to care enough about Victoria and David that you’ll tune into the Big Game to watch them hawk a food delivery service, I guess? Tom Brady — who has the distinction of actually having won a few Super Bowls, from what I’ve gathered — got in on the teaser fun with BetMGM, which will air its first-ever Super Bowl spot in 2024.
It’s not enough for these brands to capture your attention during the Super Bowl — they want you to talk about their spots before, during, and after the game. And while hypervisibility might be good for profit and online clout, it’s bad for in-person socialization between sports fans like me and their begrudging friends. After all, who wants to sit around a TV for hours and say “Oh, I already saw that one…”?