And, by the way, there’s a football game Sunday, too. That the Super Bowl is the most watched television event of the year, manna for the salted snack food product category and a de facto national holiday, is old helmet by now.
But what’s been changing is the nature of Super Bowl viewing. In media-savvy precincts at least, the balance has been shifting toward conversation during the game and silence during the advertisements, the better to see how our greedy but not entirely irredeemable friends at Nike are trying to woo us now.
Part of this is that Super Bowl games have tended to be lopsided affairs unworthy of the triumphal adjective.
But a bigger part is that TV advertisements are increasingly worthy of comparison to other art forms, themselves becoming cultural touchstones and conversation pieces. Some of the funniest, most clever and most visually arresting work on television right now is being done in 30-second bites, during the time when viewers are supposed to be off tending to personal needs.
And the Super Bowl, as the, ahem, Super Bowl of advertising, has become the place where both ad makers and their targets turn to try to comprehend the latest and greatest, as well as the most overwrought and overreaching, in the art of pitchmanship.
Directors and techniques now migrate back and forth between movies and commercials (even as the movies themselves have grown more laden with unidentified product ads); individual ads grow ever more capable of making themselves heard above the braying of the marketplace; and the very cutting-edge ads, like novels, television programs and movies before them, have come to be about the process of making advertising.
Viz., the current Miller Lite beer campaign, which begins by showing a picture of Dick, the “creative superstar” given a pencil and a budget and told to come up with a campaign for the beer. The star of the ad, sort of, is the ad process itself, except that the joke is on the company because his concepts include a creepy, David Lynch-esque magic act and a Monty Pythonian image of a man walking through a cornfield naked from the waist down.
That a reputable company would invest huge money in such self-reflexive work demonstrates either a belief that consumers now understand innately the advertising game or, perhaps, that Lite’s money people are easily bamboozled by fast talking creative types. Either way, the message is no longer about the beer’s taste or how filling it is, but rather that the company is hip enough to satirize itself. Like countless car and beer and sneaker ads before, the pitch is still about lifestyle, but it’s about a media-savvy, hyper-ironic lifestyle.
This makes perfect sense when collections of award-winning commercials tour on the art-house cinema circuit, actors from Jonathan Pryce to Jerry Seinfeld make no apologies for becoming product spokespeople, and newspapers devote post-Super Bowl ink to the commercials.
“I remember when I got into advertising about 15 years ago, sitting in a co-worker’s office arguing that I thought advertising was going to become in the near future popular and watched as its own entertainment form,” says Tom Evans, a creative director with the agency Colle & McVoy in Minneapolis. “I think we’ve seen that happen. The whole business itself has become more exciting and dynamic and vibrant.”
At the same time, Evans acknowledges that it has become tougher in a way, as well. “There’s just a pretty astute collection of observers out there knowing what we’re doing,” he says, “which makes it harder for us to influence them.”
Almost everybody in television’s target age groups has known TV his whole life. The younger ones have not only known it, they’ve soaked its essences, its patterns of punchline and laugh track and product barrage, into their very cells. It is another piece of technology turned organic.
“To Generation X’ers . . . advertising is inseparable from the way they communicate with one another,” says Ann Marie Barry, a Boston College associate professor of communication.
Barry says that a rule of thumb on today’s campuses is “if a class is offered about advertising, it will immediately fill up.”
More recently, VCRs, remote control devices and cable television have penetrated the culture at levels of 60 to almost 100 percent, meaning the television viewer is no longer trapped with ads like a dutiful boyfriend at his girlfriend’s kid’s school play. He can fast-forward through them, watching on tape. He can sidestep them for a quick visit to another channel. He can watch a commercial-free channel, like cable’s HBO. (Ironically, one of the most heralded recent TV ads is an HBO spot, which featured Jane Goodall’s famous chimps repeating great dialogue from modern movies in a manner reminiscent of the talking pig in “Babe.” “Space Jam’s” Joe Pytka directed.)
In other words, the truism is true: The cluttered environment has forced advertisers to make their pitches more interesting. You can’t just have the Energizer battery bunny still on the move. You’ve got to turn the rabbit into an almost mythical creature, the object of obsessive pursuit by a “Twister”-like team of bunny-spotters in a high-tech van. By the end, you’ve emphasized your product’s selling point, longevity, but you’ve done it in a way that entertains.
Evans, who has done award-winning work on a mostly regional level, stresses to his clients the importance of winning the commercial break. “You are selling against other flea sprays but also against the three to seven other ads in the station break,” he tells them.
And the very best spots, to his way of thinking, reward the viewer’s attention: “Their mindset is, `Make me laugh. Make me cry. I want to feel something.’ The most effective advertisers understand that is the reason the TV is on.”
The Super Bowl as ad temple became enshrined with Apple Computer’s one-time airing of its “1984” Macintosh commercial during the game 12 years ago.
“It ran once and after that people thought they saw it thousands of times,” says Larry Cohen, a former Chicago adman now a partner in Wyse Cohen in Cleveland.
That spot helped to raise the ante for the game telecast and for the medium in general so that budgets simply to make a national commercial can exceed $1 million, the cost of 30 seconds during the Super Bowl can reach $1.3 million and it can take almost three months to shoot one ad.
Ads now routinely make an ironic point, tell an engaging story or use high tech special effects familiar from any summer blockbuster movie of recent years. One of Evans’ favorite campaigns is the dairy industry’s simple but potent ongoing pitch for milk.
“They’ve got the guy, he’s a jerk and then he dies and goes to what appears to be heaven,” Evans says. “He’s eating brownies or cookies. Then he realizes he’s in hell because there’s no milk.
“They’re doing a great job of giving us a truth about their product. The truth is milk goes with certain foods so diabolically perfectly nothing else will do. That’s a very polite, correct, honest selling proposition that appeals to people.”
More complex, and more typical of a current rampant fascination with technique, is an ad for Fila sneakers scheduled to debut during the Super Bowl. It will show Philadelphia 76ers basketball player Jerry Stackhouse scaling a skyscraper, leaping to another one to dunk a basketball, then falling–until a parachute bearing the Fila logo opens up to save him.
“It’s the kind of thing associated with Arnold Schwarzenegger,” says Barry. “The high-concept action film that has very little message to it but has a lot of action to rivet your attention.”
Barry credits the ad with having the Fila logo appear at the pivotal moment, but still cautions that “attention doesn’t translate into name recognition.”
Perhaps everybody’s favorite recent ad–G.I. Joe and Barbie taking a spin in a Nissan–shares technique with the movie “Toy Story,” but adds the nostalgic appeal of the dolls, to say nothing of trading on every kid’s eventual realization that tough-guy Joe, not effete Ken, was the better match for Barbie.
All this wizardry, of course, creates an atmosphere in which something has to be really extraordinary to stand out and in which novelty is key. The ads featuring dead celebrities brought back to life–like so many departed singers forced into post-mortem video duets with their still extant offspring–were impressive until they became ubiquitous.
Media critic Mark Crispin Miller, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, contends that in such an environment effectiveness is nearly impossible.
“The TV audience by now is so numbed to aural and visual stimuli that it takes an incomprehensible barrage of jolts even to get people to pay attention,” says Miller, the author of “Boxed In: The Culture of TV.” “The admakers now have to resort to techniques that are often painfully dizzying and often baffling.”
He cites the Reebok “This is my planet” campaign: “You get a sort of sense of glamor from these expensive athletes. Otherwise, what does it imply?”
Meanwhile, in Miller’s view, “the message is, I think, a bizarre and frightening one. The appeal seems increasingly sociopathic: You use this thing because you want to be as cool as the thing. The product over the past decade or two has become your ideal. It’s not about pleasure; it’s about power and resembling the product. It’s really very creepy.”
An irony is that, as stealth ads branch out into the culture, in the form of movie product-placement and bowl game sponsorship and such, traditional television commercials come across as almost quaint in their directness and seeming honesty.
Compare Lite’s here-is-a-campaign-for-our-beer ad to the underhandedness of a movie laden with Apple computer logos or Budweiser cans.
Thus we can let our guards down to enjoy the much-heralded recent spots for wide-legged Levi’s jeans. One (directed, incidentally, by “The Rock’s” Michael Bay) sees a young dude and dudette eye each other at the start of a long elevator ride, imagine in rapid-fire flashes a life together including marriage and parenthood, then part ways without hesitation or conversation at the end of the ride.
Another in the campaign (directed by Spike Jonze, who made his name doing R.E.M. music videos) seamlessly and hilariously blends fondness for embarrassing youthful enthusiasms with a parody of the top-rated TV series. A wounded young guy is wheeled, with “ER” frenzy, into a hospital room. His heart monitor blips once, then twice, then it starts beating the notes of the band Soft Cell’s once-inescapable dance hit “Tainted Love.” The guy sings; everybody sings. The campaign’s message is that these pants understand your carefree life and its points of reference–and, perhaps more potently, that Levi’s is a company cool enough to buy this concept.
A common thread in most of the cited ads is that the references are borrowed. Just as music videos have plumbed classic movies and photography for their arresting images, advertisements tend to take in and spit back out fragments of pop culture. Like rap musicians sampling old Motown melodies, they demonstrate more of a talent for nimble synthesis than originality.
And many of them don’t seem quite as honest or straightforward when looked at more closely. A flaw in the HBO ad is that it seems unlikely Goodall spent a lot of her time in the African bush beaming down the channel on satellite. In the Lite beer ads, it’s that anybody who can appreciate the insider message also understands that Lite is not especially hip: It’s a product of the giant Miller Brewing Corp.
In the face of increasingly sophisticated advertising, it’s those hidden manipulations viewers have to keep in mind. Just because the monkey can be made to talk doesn’t mean it’s telling the truth.
