TOM HUMPHRIES - SUPER BOWL:The veritable cult of the Super Bowl ad is a branch of learning and theology almost entirely separate from the game itself
IT’S THE economy, stupid! The Super Bowl, let’s face it, is just a few hours of big men chasing a little bit of pigskin. Their exertions are sandwiched into a week-long trade fair, a great hearty lollapalooza of a blow out.
Football? Tuesday’s media day, where the hacks graze among the behemoths like sheep on Easter Island, tends to focus on what might actually happen in the game at the end of the week. For the rest of the time we chatter about the chatter, we create a buzz about the buzz. Mainly we talk about advertising. Tactics. Pace. Timing. Deep stuff.
The Super Bowl is about the sell and the sizzle. There are Super Bowl parties dotted all over town every night. They aren’t designed to be particularly hard to get into. Quite the opposite. They force you in with a cattle prod. The parties carry sponsors’ names and are a simple way of drawing a crowd in to look at some stuff for sale. The old bottle of snake oil routine.
There is that, but then there is the veritable cult of the Super Bowl ad, a branch of learning and theology almost entirely separate from the Super Bowl itself. The shocked gasp or the low whistle of excitement is the standard hosanna or amen when entering the Church of the Super Bowl Commercial.
Basic tenet of the faith? Super Bowl ads must cost more each year. When that stops happening no amount of Obamas and Yes We Cans can save America. When the Super Bowl started 42 years ago, a 30-second spot on NBC cost €28,582. Last year the same spot cost €2.06 million and the Super Bowl stumped up over 97 million viewers to watch (all say, wow!). So this year, as America lurches towards depression, the good news is that NBC are selling the Super Bowl slots at €2.29 million a toss. There is still money somewhere.
In the real world advertisements come and go, but for advertisers the Super Bowl is like a prize marrow contest. It’s about size and it is about creating your own legend.
In 1979, Coca-Cola ran an ad featuring Mean Joe Greene of the Pittsburgh Steelers who came clomping down the tunnel after a match, only for a small, angelic boy to offer him a sweet sugary drink of the sort not at all recommended for athletes. Mean Joe chugs the Coke and then tosses his jersey back to the kid.
The ad is legend. It was remade in Italy with Dino Zoff as Mean Joe, in Brazil starring Zico, in Argentina starring Maradona (Coke was still a drink to Diego then). No doubt Pat Spillane was screen-tested for an Irish version.
As luck would have it, Coke had intended to reprise the ad this year with the equally mean, but contemporarily dreadlocked, Troy Polamalu, and with Coca-Cola Zero instead of the old sugary classic being handed over. Then, as luck would have it, Troy’s team, the Steelers, made it to the Super Bowl, giving Coca-Cola that magical buzz which is the advertisers’ natural high.
For €2.29 million a shot you need to be getting a lot of buzz for your buck. When CBS runs its ninth annual poll to discover the 25-favourite Super Bowl ads of all time, you want your 30 seconds of creativity in there. When millions – yes, literally millions – log onto ifilm.com to download their favourite slots, you want them downloading the slot that your hired ponytails sweated over.
And you want newspaper chatter. Some companies are guaranteed that. Budweiser, who have debuted an entire menagerie of beer-selling animals from Clydesdales to frogs to Dalmations in their slots, are always the subject of much media curiosity and can coast for a few years on past glories or bring back old slots. Apple got Ridley Scott to direct a 1984 parody to launch the entire Mac PC idea back in 1984. The ad is still fondly recalled.
Last year there was tremendous excitement (how quaint this seems 12 months on) about an e-trade ad which featured a baby spewing up: the vomiting infant had a 70 per cent recall rate among viewers the following week! Major downloads and major watercooler chat. Big buzz. This year everyone awaits the equivalent.
Measuring the buzz is a science in itself. We know, for instance, that last year the Budweiser Clydesdales received about twice as much chatter as the ads for Audi, while the ad for the domain company GoDaddy.com drew a lot of online chatter, but most of it was negative. No chatter is bad chatter? Ask your GoDaddy. The company is back for more this year.
Last year Audi’s little-talked-about ad featured a parody of the horse’s head scene from The Godfather. Odd, then, that this year’s most talked about spot is another gangster parody, this time from Super Bowl-ad debutants Denny’s (a restaurant chain who have fought for many years to rid themselves of accusations of institutional racism). Denny’s are taking two slots in the prestigious, third quarter ad break.
The trailer (for an ad? Yup) shows three gangsters in a restaurant booth. The pay-off line is one about getting a serious breakfast inside you. The second ad (just a 15-second slot) features a couple of cowboys with hangdog expressions ordering sweets for breakfast, and again the punchline sells the idea of a serious breakfast.
In Tampa we are all excited about this. A company dogged by accusations of racism in the 1990s doing brokeback breakfast specials? Excellent.
As Denny’s are first-time advertisers a lot is expected of them. Under equal pressure, are Teleflora and the makers of Pedigree dog food – given that there is scarcely an animal or species aboard Noah’s ark who hasn’t featured in some form of Super Bowl commercial over the years, one wonders if this year’s barfing baby impact award might be going to a human eating the chicken-liver-in-jelly variety of Pedigree.
With six hours of pre-game show to fill and then an eternity of actual football filler between the advertisements themselves, we know what matters and what doesn’t matter in Tampa this week. Wow!
