Game? There was a game?
Yeah, there was a game of some sort yesterday, one in which the Green Bay Packers scored 31 runs on the Pittsburgh Steelers, with Aaron Rogers dribbling the ball for all its worth and sinking it into the net several times to take the checkered flag. The Packers won something called the Lambini trophy for their efforts, and I can’t wait for them to match up against Tiger Woods at Wimbledon later this year.
But not everyone was as in tune with the game as I was. Truth is, Super Bowl Sunday, much like Christmas, is at risk of losing its meaning in the commercial, cultural flotsam that surrounds it. It has become a telling gauge of our entertainment-saturated world, and the game itself is, for many viewers, something of an afterthought.
Consider the Super Bowl’s much ballyhooed cadre of advertisements (with each 30-second spot running a cool $3 million). As always, the ads were at times profane and salacious, proving again that most marketers believe the best way to make us buy something is by hitting someone in the crotch. Many ads resembled old Road Runner cartoons, for all their subtlety—and, judging from the guffaws at the Super Bowl party I attended, they’re still remarkably effective. Others were outrageously tawdry, making those embarrassing godaddy.com commercials look practically restrained by comparison.
But some of the commercials I thought were most effective were pretty sweet. My fave was the Darth Vader Volkswagen spot. (Please be aware that, even though I like this ad, I am in no way encouraging 6-year-olds to play around with the Dark Side.)
Rapper Eminem pitched Detroit, the Chrysler 200 and himself in one spot. The cast of Glee pitched Chevys, their own show, and the Super Bowl’s home network in another. The Black Eyed Peas were selling the Black Eyed Peas during the halftime show (though, to my eyes, not very effectively). The Super Bowl itself is perhaps the National Football League’s most effective tool when it comes to marketing itself.
Nearly everyone we saw on television yesterday came with their best Facebook-appropriate foot forward, pushing the buttons they think we want pushed, giving us what they think we want. The Super Bowl is as much about entertainment as sport—which only makes sense, since sports are as time-honored a form of entertainment as there is.
But sometimes, forums like these can give us subtext we weren’t expecting.
Christina Aguilera sang the Super Bowl’s national anthem yesterday. Her rendition was, in some respects, pitch-perfect marketing for Christina Aguilera: Her voice was primed and ready, her inflection creative and powerful.
Only one problem: She forgot the words.
She covered up well—so well I’m not sure if she was actually aware she flubbed the thing. Maybe lots of folks in the audience didn’t hear or didn’t care.
The mistake didn’t bother me that much. It happens. We all make mistakes, and if I was singing in front of 100,000 people live (and another billion on television), I’d be liable to break into “Mary Had a Little Lamb” before sobbing uncontrollably.
But it was kinda symbolic, I think, of entertainment culture today—both what’s great about it, and what’s not so great. Entertainment can be full of great artistic merit and loaded with deep emotion and heart. But sometimes, underneath all that, the actual message gets twisted. Sometimes we wind up moved by a piece of art that says something very different than what we think it says.
And that’s something to keep in mind before we buy what anyone’s selling.
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