Broken Frontier

I’ve never been much of a sports fan. Perhaps it’s my father’s fault. I’ve often found myself surrounded by a group of guys, asking me what I thought of the following night’s game, having no idea who played, let alone that there was even a game. But like most of America, I watch the Super Bowl. I usually don’t find out who’s playing until the day before.

Who did I want to win? Well, that all depends who’s asking…

My friend Monica is a Bears fan, so I wanted Chicago to win for her. However my other friend Sapph is a Colts fan, so I wanted Indianapolis to win for her. But really, my life remains unchanged despite the outcome. My annual ritual is to watch the game, ask my friends what the rules are every few minutes, grimace at the half time show, and pretend like it was a great game the next day at work.

No my friends, I do not like football and the Super Bowl is no exception. So why do I watch the Super Bowl? Well, for the commercials of course! That and the possibility of catching the occasional celebrity boob. Yes, the Super Bowl commercials are indeed a glorious display of advertising. Football fans might reminisce about a famous play in a Super Bowl they saw years ago. Me? I look back on the time I caught the first trailer for Independence Day. Advertisements are a key element to popular culture, so it stands to reason that a junkie like myself would take great pleasure in watching them.

This year advertisers will pay over two million dollars to capture your attention for a mere 30 seconds. 30 seconds! Don’t get me started on all the better things you could do with the money. I’m not going to be entertained during the game, so my hope is that I will be marginally entertained during the breaks. Granted, these are commercials for things that we see all year long.

The challenge is to make this one, monumentally expensive TV spot memorable.

How can you possibly convince your potential customers that then cannot live without your product and do so in 30 seconds? Will your spot be funny? Or sweet? Touching? Sad? There’s got to be a hook, or you will just have wasted a lot of dough. The big thrill for me is the new movie trailers that they usually show. All the cool new films show their trailers at the Super Bowl.

This year the commercials were sucktastic. There were a dozen Toyota Tundra commercials, all of which were lame. There were a handful of Coke spots, all lame. The only respectable commercials were from careerbuilders.com, but even those got lame after the second one. And the trailers were extremely disappointing. I was expecting there to be a Ghost Rider trailer, being that it’s coming out in a couple weeks. Of course there are always a slew of trailers for family films. The kind of trite, mainstream garbage that makes me dry heave. The movie with John Travolta and Martin Lawrence looked just… there are no words. Another computer generated film from Disney? Need I remind you how horrendous Chicken Little was? They’ll never make it without Pixar. GoDaddy.com got slammed a couple years in a row for their racy commercials. This year they toned it down significantly (without leaving out their signature cleavage shots).

Which leads me to my next complaint. There’s been this giant push to make the Super Bowl more wholesome. Because of offenders like GoDaddy.com, Janet Jackson’s breast, and that steamy Desperate Housewives commercial, viewers were getting up in arms that the game wasn’t watched just by adults.  I mean, come on! What television program wouldn’t benefit from more full frontal nudity? Hell, you might even get an un-athletic sportless heathen like myself to pay attention between commercials.

So, overall: The game held my attention for about 5 minutes. The half time show with Prince was lame. I was more entertained watching the Kitty Half-Time show on Animal Planet. And the commercials? Well, I’ve seen better. A disappointing year for advertising indeed. I was so hoping for a new Spider-Man 3 trailer.

The highlight of the game for me? The end.