“What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.”
-Don Draper, Mad Men
It's the Super Bowl! You've gathered around the TV, perhaps with friends or family, plate of nachos or chicken wings in your lap. There's a break in the football action, the screen dims, and everyone leans in a little closer: Time for Super Bowl ads! This is what we've waited all year for! Let's see what they got for us!
And then, 30 or 60 seconds later, you're a blubbering puddle, dabbing at your eyes with a sauce-stained napkin and looking for your children to hug or trying to call your parents.
It's a good thing Super Bowl XLIX ended up being one of the greatest games in the sport's history, because otherwise it'd be remembered only for the unrelenting pathos of the ads. Prosthetic limbs, gender bias, puppies in danger, bullying, childhood mortality ... this was the single most depressing Super Bowl ad lineup in history, with only the occasional flying pig or Human Pac-Man Game to break from the unrelenting plod of Very Important Advertisements.
Let's review, shall we? We'll start with the Sad Puppy In Danger ad:
Next, the Your Kids Are Growing Up Too Fast, Dad ad:
The You're Secretly Thankful This Isn't Your Kid ad:
And finally, the granddaddy of them all, the Your Kid Is Going To Die Soon ad:
Oh, man. Hang on, give us a moment here.
Really, although the Super Bowl is a de facto national holiday, it's not that we want nothing but crotch-kicks, explosions, and wacky talking animals. A serious-minded ad, well-delivered, can have a huge and lasting impact. But Seriousness is now a Brand Attribute, a gimmick like CGI'd animals, a cynical attempt to pluck your most vulnerable heart strings while offering you a sweet, warm, advertiser-approved handkerchief for your tears.
I'd tell you that the pendulum will swing back, that soon enough we'll once again see the likes of WAZZAP and Terry Tate, Office Linebacker, but here's the thing: advertisers are convinced they're doing Big Important Work here. For instance, here's the president of the advertising agency responsible for the dead-kid ad:
Where to begin? It was an advertisement, not a film. It was deliberately, consciously provocative, not brave. If Ogilvy & Mather and Nationwide were interested in #makesafehappen as something more than a means for promoting their own #brand, they'd have kept the Nationwide logo off the ad entirely.
Certainly, the people who make ads are good and decent folk who mean well and do the best they can at their chosen profession. But don't let the soft focus, market-tested actors, carefully honed tag lines, and nostalgic music fool you. Ads' purposes are, in descending order of importance to the advertiser:
1. Make you buy stuff
2. Make you aware of the company so you'll buy stuff in the future
3. Win fancy awards for the company's ad agency
....
753. Raise social consciousness.
Big Important Serious ads are all over your TV right now because, and only because, advertisers think that in 2015 they work effectively to promote a given product or service. Advertisers spend a lot of money ($4.5 million per 30 seconds) to cast a wide net during the Super Bowl, and it's a heck of a lot easier to make you feel guilty, nostalgic or empathetic than it is to make you laugh.
So next year, rather than getting your guts torn out by a succession of Super Bowl ads, push away from the TV during ad time. Make sure you cry at your party for the right reason: because you ladled way too much hot sauce on your wings.
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter.
And keep up with Jay over on Facebook, too.
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