Great game, awful commercials

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 486, Feb. 14, 201

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THE STUPID BOWL

Great game, awful commercials
what it says about America

By John Greenwald

I'm not a sports fan, but there's one game I watch every year -- the Super Bowl. True, I watch it less for the game than for the commercials, which are suppose to showcase the best of Madison Avenue.

This year, Super Bowl 44 was exceptionally exciting. (I refuse to attach Roman numerals to Super Bowls because they're pretentious.) SB44 drew a larger audience than any other single American telecast: 106.5 million people tuned in, compared to the 106 million who saw CBS' "M*A*S*H" in 1983. Sports events are the only broadcasts that increase in ratings; the rest of broadcast TV shrinks a littler every year.

If the game was extraordinary, the commercials weren't. Mainly, they stunk.

True enough, you can go to YouTube or Hulu on the Web to see 4-5 minutes of the game's funniest or best commercials. But those little compilations don't show the 30-40 minutes of the big show's remaining commercial dreck.

Most of these spots don't stand out of the crowd. Worse, they insult average viewers' intelligence. Despite more that a half century of trying to sell us stuff over TV, Madison Ave still relies on a boring, brutish hard sell, which makes its efforts and the products it advertises so forgettable.

According to Hulu, the TV Web site, these are viewers' most popular ads:

Doritos ("House Rules," with the overprotective kid and his mom's intimidated date); Google ("Search On," a Parisian love story told only in Google searches); Snickers' touch football game starring Betty White; Doritos, again, with the dog collaring its master; and Motorola, with actress Megan Fox sending around the world a cell phone photo of herself in a bubble bath, with deleterious and comical results.

Note the relative wit and humor of these spots, the way they circle around their subjects, instead of hitting us over the head with their hard sell. No wonder people liked them enough to see them again on Hulu or YouTube. But most Super Bowl commercials I neither liked nor remembered.

However, there were a few exceptions, exceptions of the "thumbs down, thumbs very down" kind.

First was the spot for the Denny's restaurant chain promoting some kind of breakfast discount. The theme was the chain was going to serve so many eggs it was freaking out vast armies of chickens. In every shot, chicken puppets would pop up screeching and screaming at the horrible prospect of laying millions of more eggs.

All I could think of was how these hens are kept in egg farms, each in its own cage, so confined it can't even turn around. No wonder they're crying in pain. This light-hearted spot had turned into a sick, sadist joke.

I'm no tree-hugging PETA fan, but I was so upset I couldn't remember what Denny's deal was. A free breakfast the third Tuesday in every month with an R, or some such?

More distressing was the commercial for the eco-friendly Audi. Platoons of eco cops were arresting environmentally unfriendly suburbanites for such crimes as using incandescent light bulbs or Styrofoam coffee cups. Instead of being a series funny exaggerations, the ad became a frightening depiction of fascist storm troopers dressed in green instead of SS black. I suspect those opposed to environmentalism will use this commercial to illustrate "eco-nazism."

Advertising like this begins with smart, creative people impressed with their own ideas to the exclusion of serving their clients' needs and everyday common sense. The ad people get so caught up with their imagined cleverness, they end up being plain stupid and wasting literally millions of dollars (nearly $2.9 million to buy the advertising time for each commercial, plus the cost of creating each one).

There's also a larger problem behind the ad business' inflated sense of self: its low opinion of the American public. Just look at the average run of TV ads. Their makers must think we're idiots, no brighter than the average clucking chicken.

Maybe it's the economy, but marketers think all we want to buy is car insurance and medications for flu and colds (and hay fever in the summer), and for depression and erectile dysfunction. We're either scared or sick, or scared of being sick.

No wonder audiences have deserted broadcast TV for cable, which has far fewer ads, or for premium cable, which has none. Or to cable's OnDemand feature, again with fewer commercials and the remote that can fast forward past the remainder. Ditto, to DVRs and TiVos, with their blessed "ff."

Years ago, I argued in this space that television was killing its own golden goose. For two generations it was hauling in outsized profits, especially by exploiting the commercial. A half-hour sitcom has only 22 minutes of programming; the other eight are reserved for advertising.

More and shorter commercials overstuff available time and clog the mind. So many are shoveled into commercial breaks that the same ones have to be repeated again and again and again before they register with viewers. And when they do register, do we appreciate their humor and story telling? Or do we think about them with annoyance, if not disgust, at both the sales pitch and the product they're selling?

For recent columns, go to www.johngreenwald.blogspot.com. Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

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