Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [86]
Brian McDermott, a creative director at McCann Erickson, said that Super Bowl ads absolutely are a reflection of the zeitgeist: “For starters, advertising is a fashion industry. The type of humor used in a commercial … the type of film, the casting, music, wardrobe, settings, and of course the subject matter all reflect what agencies think will resonate best at a particular moment.”
Ernie Schenck, co founder of Pagano, Schenck & Kay and a columnist and contributing editor for Communications Arts magazine, agrees that spots like “1984,” “Lizards,” and “Dancing Monkey” reflected the tenor of the times, but he feels that in recent years “they’ve gotten more stupid. More sophomoric. It’s weird that the work in recent years has been so uninspiring because it costs so damned much money, especially at a time when TV as an advertising medium is under such heavy fire from the Web.”
Ted Cohn, another former colleague still working in the industry and the author of the astute and funny arts, politics, and pop culture blog Teddy Vegas, is inclined to say that Super Sunday’s ad offering is not a reflection of the national zeitgeist. “Each year a handful of creative teams at the same three or four agencies spend a few weeks sowing their creative seeds in the soil of entertainment possibility. To the extent that I see any trends, I’d say the ads overall have tended to rely more and more on the tried-and-true conventions of talking animals, talking babies, and sexual innuendo. And they have more and more wholeheartedly embraced the sheer gratuitousness of advertising as a medium.”
Another former colleague who would prefer to remain anonymous had a different take on the zeitgeist hypothesis: “The last few times I watched the Super Bowl, with its lavish halftime shows and multimillion-dollar thirty-second commercials and its sheer, unabashed celebration of excess, I couldn’t help imagining someone thinking of it as a three-hour-long recruitment film for Al-Qaeda.”
This led me to wonder what kind of impact the Tom Petty half-time show might have on Al-Qaeda recruitment.
The Phenomenon of the Almost
Rather than looking for deep cultural meaning in the dozen or so beer commercials (all based on the premise of the extent to which a man will go to protect his twelve ounces of hops, barley, and malt or to steal the beer of another), perhaps we can glean more revealing truths from sampling a relatively new phenomenon: the ads that didn’t make it onto the Super Bowl yet found audiences of millions nonetheless.
At the Super Bowl ad factory DDB Chicago (which has done scores of Super Bowl commercials for clients like Bud, Bud Light, and Cars.com) and at most Super Bowl agencies, it is not uncommon for hundreds of concepts to be pitched internally for every spot that eventually makes it on the air. Depending on the account, up to several dozen of the best are then storyboarded to take to the client, for one or more rounds of meetings. Then the work that survives the client (and the franchisees, and the board, and the CEO’s mistress) goes on to several stages of testing to make sure that it hits all the right brand-differentiating notes, isn’t overly offensive (minorly offensive seems to be okay), and has the creative juice to break through as a Super Bowl spot. But if the trend of previous years continues, you will see more and more spots that were deemed unsuitable for TV finding new fame online.
Not long ago, those spots that were rejected by a client, that failed in consumer testing, or that were finally banned by the network or the NFL would be stuck in a closet never to be seen again. But now “banned” doesn’t necessarily mean “killed.” Now “banned” merely means “forbidden,” and if YouTube, iFilm, and a number of other viral-video sites that run Super Bowl Almosts are an indicator, “forbidden” means “watch me again and again and again.”
Besides being the master of the on-air Super Bowl commercial, repeatedly