We’re not even a minute into Super Bowl XLIX when the kid in the Baja hoodie decides it’s high time to start in with the harangue, that tiresome spiel about sports and consumerism that is at once cloyingly naïve and contemptibly smug. “I can’t stand football. I’m only here to watch the commercials,” he mumbles from within the folds of his drug rug, and almost immediately every Pats fan within earshot is entertaining dark thoughts.
Since nobody knows how Roman numerals work, let’s just say that it’s 2015.
Now, the people who’ve gathered to watch the Big Game on this unseasonably warm February evening are an affable enough bunch, an assortment of even-tempered citizens who volunteer and run half-marathons when they’re not racking up the billable hours. (Maybe 65% of the partygoers huddled together in this Upper East Side den are lawyers; a clump of art directors, serial entrepreneurs and unreconstructed malingerers rounds out the guest list.) And yet, there’s something about the anti-football guy, something beyond the provocations of youth and his seemingly rehearsed philippic, that chews the nerves. Observation: If enough people in a confined space roll their eyes at the same time, it makes a little squishy noise.
“There’s no spontaneity to this sport,” the Sour Diesel Sourpuss drones, shortly after Marshawn Lynch cannonballs his way up the gut for a six-yard gain. “The commercials, though—that’s where it all happens. That’s the true national pastime: Unfettered capitalism.” Then, just as it seems as if we’re all about to be lectured on the evils of the free market by an ambulatory Hacky Sack, it happens.
Midway through the second quarter, a young boy on a tricycle appears on the screen. Shadowed by a friendly black dog, he’s struggling to keep up with his gang of friends who are breezing ahead on their big-kid bikes. After lamenting, “I’ll never learn to ride a bike”—not with that attitude, buster—the boy starts ruminating about all the other things he’ll never get to experience (getting cooties from a girl, sailing the open sea with the dog, etc.) because, as it turns out, he’s dead. “I couldn’t grow up because I died from an accident,” the boy says into the camera, as something like 114 million Americans clutch their skulls in disbelief. Even the contrarian swathed in the unrefined hemp fibers has been struck dumb.
It’s a Nationwide insurance spot, one presumably meant to start a national conversation about the inherent lethality of everyday household objects and the irrevocability of death. The camera then takes leave of the boy, only to linger over the most likely instruments of domestic deliverance. As efforts to return our jaws to their default settings continue, we’re all afforded a good long look at some decidedly grim tableaux. A shot of bath toys floating in an overflowing tub gives way to a jumble of munched-on kitchen poisons, before—horribile dictu!—we’re greeted by the image of a collapsed big-screen TV, lying face down amid shards of broken glass.
If it probably should go without saying that you shouldn’t implicitly kill a child in the service of selling insurance policies, the Nationwide spot’s second greatest transgression was in identifying a TV set as an agent of extermination. On a day in which more people are hunkered down in front of the tube than on any other, it is perhaps inadvisable to suggest that a poorly mounted HD monitor might make for a somewhat less-cluttered family portrait.
Flash forward eight years and there’s almost zero chance that we’ll ever again be so riled by a misfiring Super Bowl commercial. For one thing, marketers aren’t likely to forget the lessons learned from the Nationwide fiasco; if the average lifespan of a CMO is already mayfly brief, anyone who signs off on scripted infanticide is really going to skew the numbers. Despite pleading his case to the ad trades (“we were trying to save children’s lives”), the Nationwide CMO was out of a job four months after the spot aired.
Instincts of self-preservation aside, the prevailing dynamics of Super Bowl marketing strategy no longer allow for much in the way of game-day surprises. For years now, the playbook has called for the “creative” (that’s AdLand lingo for whatever commercial pitch you’re seeing on the screen or page) to be released in advance of the game, in order to maximize the number of impressions a spot garners over its (usually brief) lifespan. By the time things kick off in Phoenix, you’ll have all but memorized that Serena Williams/Brian Cox/Tony Romo Caddyshack spoof; three days after Michelob posted the 30-second spot on YouTube, the clip had garnered more than 14 million views.
In forfeiting the possibility of collective discovery, advertisers have taken much of the fun out of the Super Bowl breaks. In keeping with our national slide into a sort of beige mediocrity, the ads themselves are mostly meh, although that’s a separate issue. Like everyone else, I suffer from the delusion that things were better when I was a kid, which is certainly true if we’re talking about the state of my knees. Twenty-year-old me’s knees didn’t make the sounds of a horse biting into a fresh stalk of celery, so there’s that.
Anyway.
Most network execs say they lament the passing of the big Super Bowl reveal, although the occasional live stunt can still brew up a little excitement during the breaks. “Call me old school, but the shift away from keeping things under wraps has really changed the experience of watching the ads,” said Mark Evans, who, as executive VP of ad sales at Fox Sports, moved nearly $600 million in game-day inventory. “There used to be a veil of secrecy in place, but now the paradigm has completely shifted. I get it, the world’s changing, and advertisers want to make sure that they can wring out every last impression from their Super Bowl buys. But personally, I think we’re losing the element of surprise, and I miss that.”
Of course, we haven’t seen every spot that’s set to air in Fox’s Chiefs-Eagles showdown, so there’s always a chance that something fresh pops during the breaks. Movie studios are still a bit squirrelly when it comes to safeguarding their Super Bowl creative (in many cases, this is because a final cut of a trailer won’t be shipped until the morning of the game), and Gronk’s live field goal attempt for FanDuel is the very definition of an undetermined outcome. In the best of all possible scenarios, the game itself will be so gripping from start to finish that the ad breaks will function as a series of cooling-off periods, slices of time in which to reflect upon the glories of televised football and the sadness of knowing that a six-month drought awaits.
You may also choose to view the breaks as an opportunity to get more bets down—we’re not here to judge what you do with your kid’s college fund. Say what you will about that Nationwide ad, but an insurance policy payout may lead to an even bigger ROI if you let it all ride on the spread.
Back here in 2015, however, gambling is still illegal. And for all the mishegas about that one ad, this game is a certifiable banger. After the Pats engineered a sensational fourth-quarter rally, Wilson’s arm (and a four-bobble reception by Jermaine Kearse) has brought the defending champs down within a yard of another title. Beast Mode has picked up 102 of the Seahawks’ 162 yards on the ground, and is averaging 4.3 yards per carry. Pete Carroll may as well be drenched in Gatorade, and Brady & Co. are about to absorb their third straight Super Bowl defeat.
Second and goal. Twenty-seven seconds on the clock. On the Upper East Side, the Pats fans look positively stricken. No one knows, or cares, what happened to the dude in the pot poncho. A partner at Skadden, Arps is comforting her husband, who hauls in probably high-eight figures and is already making with the waterworks. Russell Wilson stands in the shotgun formation, Lynch crouched to his immediate left. There’s a desultory rummaging among the coats. Nothing short of a catastrophically ill-advised call—think harebrained, think a Nationwide-scale miscue—could derail Seattle now.
