Like many of you, I watched the Big Game this weekend as much for the advertisements as for the game. Super Bowl advertising is supposed to be the renegade, cowboy behavior of capitalism. You wonder who these people are, with their unabashed risk-taking and assumption of the spectacular. At $3 million per spot, most of us in the everyday world of advertising and marketing wonder, “How the hell?” Remember, very few brands get to participate in the masturbatory Greek mythology of Super Bowl advertising. But wow. We’re jealous.
So, we watch. And watch. We tweet like the nutcases we are. What are we looking for? We're looking for excellence. We seek boundary-pushing advertising. We expect crazy-good advertising. At that price, how can you fail?
Well, we fail quite well, actually. Aside from the links above—and a few others—mediocrity was abundant. What a waste. I can’t even imagine the cutting room floor where the client or ad executives got cold feet and encountered fear face-to-face in a desperate war between awesomeness and job security.
The people who provide funds to create ads are, indeed, good people. They’re not unlike you and me. They have kids and mortgages and upward career mobility. Ad people are no different, except in the sense that ad people are, for Super Bowl ads, risk takers. The number of excellent, entertaining, shocking, fascinating, out-there ads that were created is mostly on the cutting room floors of advertising agencies. (Of course, you know that the cutting room floors these days are the terabyte hard drives of production houses worldwide.)
These ads will never see the light of day. They will live in obscurity behind the firewalls of legal hush-teams who protect brands from themselves. Of course, this is bullshit. Those digital archives are the asylums of great ideas and risk-taking creative that some men or some women simply were scared out of their exoskeleton to put their names behind. They were terrified of their own job security, their legal teams, and their own customers to launch content that would truly have been groundbreaking and brand-building.
In the Steve Jobs’ bio, we learned that the Greatest Ad of All Time—the “Why 1984 Won’t Be 1984” ad from Apple—was nearly destroyed by the board of that company. It almost didn’t release. Had it gone through regular processes of fear and loathing, you would never have seen it, and I would never have written about it. But clearly, that was an ad for the ages.
This year’s mix of creative in the Super Bowl was representative of brands’ fear of taking risks. Most brands during this year’s big game fed at the sophomoric troughs of basic human instincts and needs: the redundant sexuality of GoDaddy, the shallow sense of thrill of driving cars on winding roads you’ll never drive on, the existential abomination of robots brewing beer. Really? Do I really want my beer made by robots? The biggest audience of the year with the biggest ad spend? This is it?
I do not indict the agencies who produced ads for this year's Super Bowl. Their best stuff, you’ll never see. Those who leak the best stuff will be brought in front of the corporate panel of Inquisitors, only to be banished to the dungeon of freelance. Everything you saw was spit-polished by a fearful market of risk-intolerant brands.
Enjoy.
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Posted by: Facebook Game | Apr 12, 2012 at 01:49 AM