A whopping 108.4 million people watched the Baltimore Ravens eke out a narrow victory over the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday—though for a lot of folks, the game was an afterthought.
I know, as a football fan, it’s hard to believe. Some people couldn’t care less whether the Ravens stopped the 49ers on San Fran’s last series or which Harbaugh brother hoisted the Lombardi trophy or why the janitors apparently opted to flick that little light switch. No, some people watched the Super Bowl to see the commercials.
I understand the appeal. I love checking out the Super Bowl ads every year. I love it when a mini Darth Vader powers up his pop’s car or when a dot-com company sends out some rough hombres to herd cats. The ads can be fun and informative and, every now and then, a bit winsome.
But the commercials can’t dodge Plugged In’s persnickety gaze. If we had our druthers, we would’ve slapped several with parental warning stickers—or at least written 2,000-word informative reviews on ’em.
If we were going to throw some of these commercials in our standard movie review form, we could fill up our content sections without much difficulty.
Take “Spiritual Content.” Stevie Wonder’s voodoo-themed Bud Light ads were just dripping with weird, less-than-theologically correct spirituality. And then, of course, you’ve got Tide with its miracle stain of Joe Montana.
Some commercials were full of sexual content. (I don’t know about you, but I could’ve done without the guys parading around in their Calvin Kleins. And while viewers might have a myriad reactions to the bikini-clad woman who’s rendered topless by a scorpion, I don’t think the first would be “Wow! I’m gonna run out and buy a Fiat 500 Abarth!”)
Some were violent. (The Kia Forte featured a scantily clad android giving a poor consumer a wedgie and flinging him across a showroom). And some were a very strange mixture of both. Did anyone else find the M&M’s rendition of “I Would Do Anything for Love,” juxtaposed with beautiful girls trying to chomp on his head a little disturbing?
We certainly saw our share of “Drug and Alcohol Content.” I counted at least eight commercials that peddled some sort of alcoholic beverage, though admittedly I might’ve missed one or two when I visited the kitchen for more chips. Ironically, one of them might’ve been the most family friendly of the bunch. Whatever you think of drinking beer, those Clydesdales sure are cool.
As for “Other Negative Content,” well, do we need to go much further than GoDaddy’s ooky, obscenely loud kiss between model Bar Refaeli and a bespectacled computer expert? That thing gave me nightmares.
But when it came down to positive content, one commercial really stood above the rest for me—the only ad in which our whole family room full of guests actually hushed themselves and watched all the way through: Dodge Ram’s “God Made a Farmer.”
Sure, we’ve heard that the spot took its inspiration from another YouTube clip made a couple years earlier. It’s come under a bit of fire for failing to include a representative number of Hispanics (who make up a great deal of the farming community). Still, it does salute a way of life that, one could argue, is more a fading ideal than a reality these days. And you could argue it wasn’t really a particularly effective ad—at least if by “effective,” you mean selling more Dodge trucks. After the ad aired, Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Brandon McCarthy tweeted, “That convinced me, I’m buying a farmer first thing tomorrow.”
But the ad did something some of the best Super Bowl ads have been adept at doing in recent years—be it a Clint Eastwood narration or a rap-backed salute to Detroit. It tapped into a set of shared values. It spoke to a national ethos. The ad, in some ways, made us proud to be American, as odd as that sounds—even if our main familiarity with farming is through that commercial itself.
Oh, and it also reminded us just how cool Paul Harvey was.
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