Super Bowl ads have always been terrible

The reason you thought Super Bowl ads were good once is that you were a child at the time.

The Dunkin Donuts ad starring the Afflecks was so loaded up with cameos and inside jokes that it would have stopped making sense if only it had ever begun to make sense in the first place.

Last night I put the Super Bowl on in the living room. Not because I cared at all about the game but because kids at my son’s school are starting to have adorable little first-grader opinions about the NFL. If The Big Game came up at the lunch table, I wanted him to feel included. What I noticed, however, was that my son would drift over to his Lego table when the actual game was happening and only re-focused his attention on the television during the commercials. (This comes off as judgy, but he had the right idea, if you ask me.)

Somewhere around the completely nonsensical Dunkin’ Donuts ad, I attempted to explain why Super Bowl ads are supposed to be a big deal. What I found is that while it’s not that difficult to explain to an almost-seven-year-old why Super Bowl ads are so expensive, it is quite difficult to explain why all that money only buys you a 60-second spot of a seal with a human’s face that, in the bizarre logic of TV ads, is supposed to make you want to drink Mountain Dew.

My son was born 22 years after the high-water mark of Seal’s celebrity and so obviously had no idea who he was. Nor did he understand anything else that was happening in any of the other commercials (and neither did I, for that matter) — but he was glued to the TV all the same. Because TV ads are like Cocomelon for adults: scientifically engineered to capture and hold your attention by using bright colors, loud noises, and frenetic pacing. As people are increasingly distracted from the distraction machines on their living room wall by the distraction machines in their pockets, I suspect this has only gotten worse.

Around the same time I was trying to explain to a seven-year-old the enduring, quasi-irony-laden cultural potency of “Kiss From A Rose” , I saw the following skeet:

This is a thought that bubbles up every year during the Super Bowl, and I’m not convinced it’s true. There’s a mythology around the quality of Super Bowl ads, and I think it’s worth asking who benefits from that mythology: the companies that make the ads!

But what I’m proposing is that these ads have always been terrible.

Consider the following from 1997, pulled from a listicle USA Today published featuring what are supposed to be the best Super Bowl ads from each year.

To recap: here are some bears dancing to “YMCA,” therefore you should drink Pepsi.

Okay.

Or there’s this one from 2014, which features a golden retriever puppy and a horse who are friends and, notably, does not feature a single frame that includes a Budweiser — the product for which this is ostensibly an advertisement.

Ok, sure. This is a perfectly fine short movie about a dog that loves a horse. And yes, I know that this is a reference to a previous Budweiser ad that actually does contain beer. But if I need a Budweiser wiki to understand the complex backstory of your ad, then your ad is not effective. And this isn’t just a randomly picked ad from 2014 — it was, according to some branded content that ran in a major newspaper, the very best of the bunch!

Just because a company spends the annual GDP of Saint Kitts & Nevis on a 30-second ad doesn’t mean the ad is any good; it just means a lot of people watch the Super Bowl and that executives of multinational corporations are too rich to understand how much things are supposed to cost.

Honestly, any television ad that’s halfway decent should be treated as a minor miracle. The people who make them are tasked with carrying out the morally dubious task of convincing people they should spend money on something that they almost always do not need and that will very often actually make them worse off. Anyone who can start with those shitty ingredients and create 1) an actual story that 2) is memorably connected to the product in some way, might just be an actual genius.

It’s no wonder, then, that the unifying theme behind most modern advertisements is to make the content of the ad about anything other than the actual product.

Which is probably why the ads that stood out the most on Sunday night were the ones with messages like “Canada is a pretty good place”; “breast cancer is, in my opinion, bad” and “women should get to participate in society.” It was kind of wild how edgy these relatively anodyne sentiments felt, but that says more about what’s happening in America right now than it does about the ads.

Despite my overall grumpiness, I do think the Lay’s ad actually did manage to thread this needle, even if it probably paints an incredibly unrealistic picture of the Lay’s supply chain.

A quick note on Kendrick Lamar

I am far too old and far too white to present myself as an authoritative voice on the quality of this performance. So I’ll just keep this brief and say that I thought it kicked ass, and that I heard echoes of Beyonce’s halftime show performance from 2016, in which she did not do or say anything overtly political, and yet the mere act of being black on television was enough to send the usual suspects into hysterics. This time, Kendrick cleverly anticipated that reaction¹ by having Uncle Samuel L. Jackson provide live commentary about the performance being “too ghetto” — and I honestly can’t believe the person who reviews the running order to make sure it isn’t going to make any billionaires mad let them get away with it.

Just like the ads about Ontario and women’s flag football, the fact that the performance felt so edgy said more about the audience than it did about the performer.

1. Not surprising, since Kendrick’s tuned in enough to that scene to have sampled a Fox News panel’s complaints about his performance at the 2015 BET Awards on the haunting DAMN standout “BLOOD.”