The real reason to watch the sports event of the season

[naomikritzer]

I'm one of the people who watches the Superbowl commercials, and then reads a book during the parts where football players are running around. I've been known to pay a bit more attention when the Patriots are playing (that's the team Ed roots for) but I just didn't have enough invested in the Bears to pay attention, particularly once they started losing.

But the commercials -- those were fun. Both of the good ones, and the ones where Ed and I looked at each other and said, "what were they thinking?"

My favorite commercial aired early -- the Blockbuster ad where the bunny is trying to click the mouse. I also loved the horror movie Bud Light ad. (A man and a woman are driving along, and the man sees a guy trying to hitchhike. He says, "He's got Bud Light!" The woman says, "He's got an axe!" The man pulls over, and asks the hitchhiker why he's got an axe. The hitchhiker leers and says, "bottle opener." A minute later as the three of them are cruising down the road, they pass another hitchhiker. The man says, "He's got Bud Light!" The axe-carrying hitchhiker says, "But he's got a chainsaw!")

Coke and Frito-Lay both aired ads that made reference to the two black coaches, and how groundbreaking this was. The Frito-Lay ad was better done, and is really pretty impressive given that they presumably had to script, cast, film, and edit it in the last two weeks. (Coke's ad may have just been a Black History Month ad, come to think of it. It just seemed very appropriate given how much the commentators were talking about the two black coaches.) Budweiser did not have an ad like this, which surprised me a little; they normally run a sappy ad at some point, and that would've been a good theme to pick.

There were two ads that made me wonder what on earth the adwriters were thinking. In the second quarter, there was a Chevy ad in which a bunch of men stripped naked and attempted to hump a car being driven by a couple of women. I had two thoughts about this: (1) why was Janet Jackson's nipple sooooooooo shocking and yet it's totally okay if my daughters see a strip tease? And (2) why the hell would the implications here make me want to buy this car? I guess the ad is targeted at men, but most men would also be kind of freaked out by the idea of other men stripping naked and trying to hump their car. Even very evolved, non-homophobic men would probably find that a somewhat disturbing image.

The winner of tonight's WTF Award, however, was GM. The ad showed an anthropomorphized robot drop a screw, and immediately get escorted off the property as punishment for its mistake. It proceeded to engage in a bunch of crappy dead-end jobs while wistfully watching GM cars drive by, and it finishes by throwing itself off a bridge -- only to snap out of it, pick up the screw, and continue with its work. The punchline was supposed to be something about how the new GM guarantee has everyone just obsessed with quality. Except the overwhelming thrust of the ad, the images anyone would take away after watching it, was that LAYOFFS REALLY SUCK. Why the hell would any U.S. automaker would want to increase people's mental association between them and layoffs? The robot was actually a highly appealing character, and if they'd done almost anything else with the robot, that probably would have been a decent ad, possibly one of the best of the night.

None of these ads approached the brilliance of the first ever Monster.com Superbowl ad, which had sweet-faced children smile into the camera and say things like, "When I grow up, I want to have a brown nose!" and "When I grow up, I want to file allllllll daaaaaaaaay." It finished with the tag line, "What did you want to be when you grew up? There's a better job out there: monster.com." Now that was a truly fabulous ad.

Apparently you can watch all of this year's ads here, if you're curious.

Comments

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

OMG yes about the GM ad. I grew up (more or less) in Michigan, about an hour south of Flint. They should know better. We were watching it in sort of horrified fascination--it was funny in an awful sort of way.

[naomikritzer]

"Funny in an awful sort of way" nails it.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_contingent_/]

You read that Chevy ad very differently than I did -- I read it as a undercutting reversal of the traditional male-focused "bikini car wash" scenario, where a hot sports car causes women to strip to their skivies and start fondling and buffing the shiny ersatz manhood. They went out of their way to show men of many varying degrees of mainstream attractiveness, and to show one of the women not being thrilled with the situation. It felt like they were trying to leave a lot of cues to read this as non-threatening play, mostly mocking the way men look to cars to prop up their egos.

Your read made me curious, and one thing I found when I looked for more info on this ad is that it was, like the two Doritos spots, penned by a consumer. A first-year woman at the University of Wisconsin suggested originiated the idea for this ad.

As to your Janet Jackson comparison, while it's not a cultural norm I agree with, most people do view a bare breast as fundamentally more shocking than a bare male chest. And in FCC-land, people taking their clothes off is just fine as long as they stop with their bits covered and it's not too terribly sexual. Heck, even if it's quite sexual. They don't issue fines for music videos, many of which are vastly more sexual than either the car wash or Janet Jackson's mammary airtime. If the FCC standards made sense, George Carlin's seven words sketch wouldn't have retained currency for so long.


I quite agree that the GM ad was a major misfire. As someone who also grew up in Michigan in the shadow of layoffs, asking me to have sympathy for a robot that dreamed of getting laid off was a bit much, however cutely the ad was written. In the 70's that ad might have been funny.


My favorite was the Emerald Nuts ad. The way they framed it is what did it for me. The idea that there's an urban legend about Robert Goulet messing up offices started the narrative with a surreal spin that really appealed to me.

[naomikritzer]

You're probably right that the Chevy ad makes more sense as a reversal of the typical ad. That sort of artistic dialogue tends to sail right over my head because I don't watch enough TV to make the right connections.

The Emerald Nuts ad was great, and made both of us crack up, for the same reason you liked it -- the surrealism of the invented urban legend.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

If there were the slightest chance in hell that a crowd of men would strip naked and start fondling my car I would go out of my way to avoid buying that particular car. It sounds far more threatening than appealing to me.

I can see where it may have been intended to be funny, but I'd be surprised if there weren't a lot of women who miss the humor.

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if it sounds appealing, but it does strike me as funny.

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

Okay, I watched it and did, indeed, find it funny as a send-up of the SexyWomen Draped Over Cars genre.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's less funny for people with experience of rape; or maybe it's just me. It seems unlikely that it's just me, though.

context

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Even if the Chevy ad *is* a reversal of the traditional "bikini car wash" scenario, I still think it's threatening. When naked women are presented to male strangers as sex objects, it usually looks funny or sexy. If it looks threatening, it's the naked women who look to be at risk. Reversing the genders doesn't reverse the scenario because it doesn't reverse the context. When naked men are presented to female strangers as sex objects, it looks threatening to the women, to my eyes. It looks threatening enough to make it not funny. The women (in the commercial) being not thrilled with the situation seems to make it even more obviously a matter of sexual assault.

I agree that the GM ad was a major misfire for GM to use now. It feels like it might almost work for Monster

Re: context

[naomikritzer]

It feels like it might almost work for Monster

Oh, yeah -- see, Monster.com finding a good new job for the laid-off assembly-line robot would have been awesome. Working for Toyota, maybe. (I went looking for other commentary on the GM ad -- apparently nearly everyone watching had the same reaction I did -- and found a blog with multiple posts analyzing in detail the extent to which this commercial exemplifies what's wrong with GM. They point out that at Toyota, the attitude is not "you make a mistake, YOU GET FIRED" but "you make a mistake, we need to figure out what problem with the process created this mistake -- and we're certainly not going to just up and fire you because the experience and knowledge of our employees are some of our most important assets, and why would we waste that?"

[aelfsciene.livejournal.com]

I watched the Superbowl for the first time today because my roommate's friend convinced me ("for the commercials") and was also just WTF over the GM ad. I even ranted about it to them afterwards, over precisely what you said above; what in god's name were they thinking?

The ad that made me laugh most was the Blockbuster ad, the Careerbuilder.com ads just made me think they had a lot of money, and I was surprised at the double-showing of the GoDaddy ad. Overall yawn, from what I've heard of other years, but I suppose I was due a Superbowl. o.O

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

We didn't see most of those -- typically most of the US ads are replaced with Canadian ones -- but the WTF GM spot survived the cut. DH (whose father and older brother both worked for GM before they retired) and I stared at it open-mouthed, and when we heard the tagline said, more or less in so many words, "That was deeply, deeply messed up."

We also saw a Coke ad which featured a guy walking around doing bad things that turned out to be good things. Also a Bud Light one ... which I don't remember ::slaps forehead::. If the ones riffing on black football coaches aired here, I missed them.

In other news, am in the Super Bowl doghouse for ever and ever now, because shortly before the game started I looked in from the kitchen, where DD and I were making chocolate-chip cookies, to ask, "So, who's playing? The Jets and the Bears?"

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

The "Black Coach" Coke ad made me think of a Nike commercial my friend Sue (of CSW & Uncomfortable Questions fame) saw about 10 or 15 years ago. At the time I was very involved in AIDS stuff (both ACT-UP & The NAMES Project) and Sue was putting up with it.

Anyway, the ad starts & there's this guy in a running suit out, well...running. A title card comes up with "Ran 15 marathons this year", then back to the runner. This goes on for maybe 30 seconds--runner, factoid, runner, faction, the a final cut of the runner, and a card saying, "HIV Positive".

"No, no, no, no!!!" we both start screaming at the camera.

Then, of course, it flashes with the NIKE symbol & the words, "Just Do It".

"AAARrgh!", I screamed. "But that's how he got the virus in the FIRST place!"

[naomikritzer]

Oh. Oh dear. Oh DEAR...

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Ouch.

Ouch.

[qqthxnvkhfuuzza.livejournal.com]

Did the VoteVets ad air? The "on the one hand"/"on the other hand" one. It was supposed to run in DC, Minnesota, and Maine.

[naomikritzer]

Huh. This rings a really faint bell. Could it have been on before kickoff?

[qqthxnvkhfuuzza.livejournal.com]

It was supposed to air in the second half.

Thanks for the link, as I didn't watch the ads on TV

[dtm]

And I am very, very saddened that there are probably people for whom the FedEx ad makes sense.

Moon, freefall, what's the difference?

It occurs to me that that ad is the result of some ad exec figuring out that they could do freefall special effects and just running with it.

Re: Thanks for the link, as I didn't watch the ads on TV

[naomikritzer]

I actually kind of liked that ad except that the floating-away-from-the-moon stuff drove me nuts. Unfortunately, the SF geeks who would've liked the "ooooh, spaceships on the moon, neat-o" aspects of the ad were probably all being driven nuts by that very thing.