If you don’t follow America Football, I can tell you that last night the New York Giants beat the New England Patriots to become this season’s champions by 21-17 at the annual Super Bowl played at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.
And why on earth am I mentioning this?
I’m writing about the Super Bowl because America whips itself up into a frenzy of anticipation, not just about the impending game, but about which adverts will air during the commercial breaks. There is even a website called www.superbowl-commercials.org
The internet has been awash with speculation and comment for several weeks and last night saw an explosion of activity on Twitter which is still going on this morning unabated.
David Beckham in his pants for H&M has created a mix of opinion, his commercial has been loved or loathed in equal measure.
Chrysler’s offering complete with Clint Eastwood has fared rather better with the general consensus being that it is very good.
And Matt Broderick reprising his role at the beginning of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for Honda has exercised the minds of everyone in advertising for the last few weeks including, I have to admit, as far away as the UK.
I find it odd that a sporting event can be so inextricably linked to the commercials which break up the action. Does this say something about the relationship Americans have with advertising? Are there any other US fixtures which attract this sort of scrutiny and comment?
I cannot even begin to imagine this sort of hoo ha where adverts get as much media attention as the game itself in say, the FA Cup finals, or …. Wimbledon?
If you want to be part of the action, have a look at some of the ads HERE, and maybe you can explain the phenomenon to me.
Americans are unusually addicted to entertainment. A fact advertisers in this country have been well aware for years, but I believe it was the Macintosh commercial in 1984 which began to reveal the power of a story being told during the Super Bowl (typically our most watched program of the year). This is one of the first ads I remember people talking about for weeks after the event. Madison Ave. was listening and from there it seemed the “story” ad was born. This is a complete layman’s viewpoint, but perhaps it might shed some light.
There was the Coke / Mean Joe Greene ad in 1979 — wasn’t that a Superbowl ad? (Too lazy to look, but as a child I loved the ad. Would have been about ten).
The game is really important socially beyond the sports fans who watch it. A lot of people who don’t watch football otherwise (or only tangentially) go to Superbowl parties. And everyone goes — all social categories, including people who’d look down on US football normally. It’s a sort of secular religion. Cooking shows and media offer “superbowl party recipes” in advance for weeks (the top thing this year seemed to be some kind of Buffalo chicken wing dip). (Apocryphal?) stories are told about what happens to city plumbing systems during half time when the entire country gets up from the sofa at the same time. And the game is televised with a lot of advertising breaks. So I wonder if the initial popularity of the Superbowl ads had something to do with the fact that there are a lot of people watching for social reasons rather than because they love the sport itself, and need to be entertained so they keep watching. Now, of course, that advertisers know there’s an audience there, they cater to it. And they are paying an unbelievable amount of money for that ad space, so they want what they present to have an impact. I think good or bad, you always remember an ad if you saw it first during that game. There was the Budweiser frog thing, for instance — sticks in my mind although or probably because it was terrible.
Thank you both for your comments – really interesting.
So in fact the Super Bowl in a national institution – the Thanksgiving of the TV calendar. Are there any other events on American TV which attract such memorable advertising hype?
It occurred to me afterwards to mention: also, the game is often not that great. It was a good game yesterday, but the NFC was the stronger conference for years and so fans would say the NFC championship (the semi-final, in European terms) was the game to watch, while the SuperBowl was anticlimactic. Makes ads more important.
Anyway, I don’t think that there are other US TV events where the ads are so important and anticipated that they take on a life of their own — but I don’t watch much television, so I’m not the person to ask.
I can’t think of any other programming that generates this much advertising hype. Good point about the Joe Green ads, and the game is definitely a social event more than a sporting event. I would dare say only about half the people who watch are really football fans. Baseball is still “America’s pastime”, but it’s more difficult to get non-fans interested for possibly seven days of watching.