THE BEST SUPER BOWL COMMERCIALS OF ALL TIME:
Super Bowl 57 will be broadcast to the world on Sunday, February 12, offering hours of high-impact sports, and perhaps more importantly, hours of multi-million dollar commercials. It’s been like this for a long time, and often what products are successful during the Super Bowl carries over into what are successful in the real world.
Super Bowl commercials are there in part to attract the non-football-loving crowd, which is why they have to be engaging in the first place. It’s also why we remember so many advertisements, even the ones we weren’t around to witness. Most ads are time capsules for a specific moment in pop culture history.
Flashback to 2002: The Rebel Sell.
What American Beauty illustrates, with extraordinary clarity, is that rebelling against mass society is not the same thing as rebelling against consumer society. Through his rebellion, Lester goes from being right-angle square to dead cool. This is reflected in his consumption choices. Apart from the new car, he develops a taste for very expensive marijuana—$2,000 an ounce, we are told, and very good. “This is all I ever smoke,” his teenaged dealer assures him. Welcome to the club, where admission is restricted to clients with the most discriminating taste. How is this any different from Frasier and Niles at their wine club?
What we need to see is that consumption is not about conformity, it’s about distinction. People consume in order to set themselves apart from others. To show that they are cooler (Nike shoes), better connected (the latest nightclub), better informed (single-malt Scotch), morally superior (Guatemalan handcrafts), or just plain richer (bmws).
The problem is that all of these comparative preferences generate competitive consumption. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” in today’s world, does not always mean buying a tract home in the suburbs. It means buying a loft downtown, eating at the right restaurants, listening to obscure bands, having a pile of Mountain Equipment Co-op gear and vacationing in Thailand. It doesn’t matter how much people spend on these things, what matters is the competitive structure of the consumption. Once too many people get on the bandwagon, it forces the early adopters to get off, in order to preserve their distinction. This is what generates the cycles of obsolescence and waste that we condemn as “consumerism.”
But last week, Virginia Postrel republished a speech from 2012 noting that we need to take shopping seriously: “The good news is that there is a significant group of scholars who do understand that shopping has something to do with freedom. They are feminists. Not all feminist scholars take this view, of course. Plenty subscribe to Marxian or Freudian or status explanations. But nearly all the scholars who write about consumer culture in a way that appreciates its relation to freedom are feminists. What they teach us is that the growth of what is sometimes called the ‘consumer society’ was good for women. Poor girls could become shop clerks instead of servants. They could go shopping themselves and forge careers as buyers and even store detectives. Middle-class ladies could get out of the house into a new and respectable public sphere. They could meet friends for conversation in department-store tea rooms. Magazines supported by ads for cosmetics and fashion could argue in favor of women’s rights and give readers new images of female achievement. Businesses that wanted to sell things to women had to pay attention to what they wanted. That meant goods and services, but it also meant the environments, institutions, and behaviors that surrounded those things. The consumer society made women public and independent in new and powerful ways—not through politics, at least not at first, but through the marketplace.”