AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Innovative Marketing Geniuses Consider Running A Super Bowl Ad About Social Justice.
Related: Watch Bruce Springsteen’s First Ad Ever, for Super Bowl Commercial, Calling for ‘Unity.’
Interesting choice of a unity-oriented pitchman:
QED:
Of course, this is yet another reminder that we the home viewers aren’t the target audience for blockbuster Super Bowl ads — they’re there to win Clios and pad their directors’ demo reels.
UPDATE: James Lileks adds:
A few [of the Super Bowl commercials] were silly and light, but the overall impression was somber, dour, downbeat, with unconvincing assurances that everything would be fine and we were all in this together and we would come out okay. Here’s Bruce Springsteen looking haunted as he drives around the storyboards for Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” ending up at a church, where he lights a candle to pray for American reunification, and oh yes please buy a Jeep.
At the end I was not moved by his pleas, and more concerned that he lit a candle in a deserted church made of wood, and then left without blowing it out. Was that wise? Did the church burn down? Does it matter? A celebrity wants us to come together, and did so with his trademark croak of pained sincerity, and since we know he is the friend and bard of the Common Man, it doesn’t matter if a specific church burns down. It was a lovely gesture.
Plus some thoughts on the bizarre halftime show: “Last year: EMPOWERMENT AND SEX AND SEX EMPOWERMENT! This year: faceless people moving in mass to choreographed steps, then dissolving into random panic. There was something wrong about it, like some dank gas blown up through a fissure, filling balloons that looked like the humans who populate the shadows of a nightmare.”
More: Reddit Ad Runs Five Seconds, But Makes Its Point Against Wall Street And Robinhood.
Give Robinhood credit for having the chutzpah to advertise on the Super Bowl after its GameStop debacle: Robinhood’s very bad Super Bowl ad made some people real mad.