DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA 30-second warnings
By Robert Lipsyte
In 1987, an evangelical Christian missionary in the Philippines, Pam Tebow,
sick, pregnant, and near term, ignored her doctors' advice to abort her fifth
child. How could they know he would grow up to win a Heisman Trophy - the
highest individual award in American college football - and lead the University
of Florida to two national American football titles?
Twenty-three years later, before he even turned professional, Tim Tebow made
himself the player to beat in Sunday's Super Bowl XLIV by starring in a
30-second commercial for Focus on the Family, a Christian group that opposes
abortion and same-sex marriage. That the advertisement would run represented a
reversal of CBS's long-time policy against advocacy ads. At this late date, it
is still not certain if Tim's creation myth will be included in the
commercial, or even if the ad will be aired at all.
Whatever happens, the controversy put the game's spotlight back where it
belongs - on the advertising.
Super Bowl Sunday is America's holiest day, our all-inclusive campfire, and
with 100 million viewers, almost half of them women, about as close as we get,
without a presidential election, to taking the national pulse. The ads tell us
who we are and where we are going. They are also Madison Avenue's best chance -
at a reported US$3 million or more a minute - to create a buzz. In fact, in a
world in which TiVo-ing is spreading like wildfire, they may be Madison
Avenue's last chance to actually get watched on TV.
These days, when it comes to Super Bowl ads, the buzz never dies as YouTube,
best/worst commercial contests, chat rooms, and vigorous follow-up ad campaigns
carom around the precincts of popular culture. Sacred, profane, gross,
on-the-mark or clueless, the ads are cultural signifiers. If Tebow gets to
pitch on Sunday, his ad will share the air with the basic football consumer
groups: cars, tech, beer, soda, and chips. And, of course, he'll be right there
along with the stuff everyone is waiting to see - like those three nerds
leering at a naked Danica Patrick, the auto racer, for a website company, or
that office jerk farting for an employment service.
I am a Super Bowl ad fan. I'd rather go to the bathroom during a third-down
play than miss a commercial.
You'll want to know my all-time favorites.
"You Should Be So Lucky"
For sheer prescience when it came to American foreign policy, nothing has
beaten "Kenyan Runner", a Super Bowl commercial that ran just before Team
George W Bush led us to eight losing seasons in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at home.
Imagine a black African runner in a singlet, loping barefoot across an arid
plain. White men in a Humvee are hunting him down as if he were wild game. They
drug him and, after he collapses, jam running shoes on his feet. When he wakes
up, he lurches around screaming, trying to kick off the shoes.
This was 1999, two years before the September 11, 2001, attacks and the
invasions that followed. The sponsor was Just For Feet, a retailer with 140
shoe and sportswear super stores that blamed its advertising agency for the
spot - before it collapsed in an accounting fraud and disappeared.
Then there was prescience on the domestic front in another Super Bowl ad,
"Money Out the Whazoo". Imagine a middle-aged man wheeled into an emergency
room. Doctors and nurses turn him over and someone says, "He has money coming
out the whazoo." A hospital administrator officiously asks his distraught wife
if they have insurance. A doctor calls out, "Money out the whazoo!" The
administrator says, "Take him to a private room."
The tag line was: "You should be so lucky." This was 2000. The sponsor was
E*Trade, the online stock gambling outfit. How did they know that the economy
was going to tank just when the healthcare system would go up for grabs?
If you'd been paying attention to the ads instead of the game, you, too, could
have sold America short.
My Super Bowl favorites, you might have guessed by now, are not consensus
picks. Most fans seem to prefer the 1979 Coke commercial in which Mean Joe
Greene, the Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Fame defensive tackle, limps off the
field past a young boy who offers him his Coke. Greene sucks it down and, as
the kid turns away, says, "Hey, kid, catch," throwing him his jersey. While
this ad is usually number one or two in best Super Bowls lists, it actually
first aired several months before the game.
Oh, what a better time that was, when we truly loved our sports heroes and felt
for them when they were beaten. The remake of that ad, in 2009, showed how much
we've lost in 30 years. As Troy Polamalu, the Pittsburgh strong safety, limps
off the field, a kid offers him his Coca-Cola Zero. Before he can take it, two
Coke brand managers grab it and run off. Polamalu tackles them, grabs the
bottle, drains it, then rips off one of the manager's shirts and tosses it to
the kid.
That snarky (post-ironic?) parody of the iconic Mean Joe Greene commercial may
be obvious enough, but that's no reason not to pile on the subtexts: labor and
management in the National Football League are now gearing up for serious
confrontations. The Supreme Court is hearing one of them - a challenge to the
league's anti-trust exemption which will have an impact on, among many other
things, the sale of jerseys. No wonder Troy ripped the shirt off management's
back.
Root for Big Easy The other main candidate for top Super Bowl ad in most of those lists is
the 1984 commercial in which a woman runner, pursued by Orwellian storm
troopers, runs past hundreds of gray people listening to Big Brother to smash
the establishment (read IBM) with her sledgehammer. That Apple Revolution
really freed us, right? In the quarter-century to follow, thanks to iPod,
iPhone, and iPad, a generation without empathy, head down, shuffles into
textiness. And Apple still doesn't even have a majority market share.
(Non-commercial interruption: should you find yourself actually watching the
game, root for New Orleans. Saints quarterback Drew Brees is a member of the
executive committee of the NFL Players Association. In a recent Washington Post
op-ed column, he wrote: "[I]f the Supreme Court agrees with the NFL's argument
that the teams act as a single entity rather than as 32 separate, vigorously
competitive and extremely profitable entities, the absence of antitrust
scrutiny would enable the owners to exert total control over this
multibillion-dollar business." A final decision on what originally was a suit
brought by a jilted gear supplier is expected this summer.)
The modern Mad Men and Women who call the signals for Super Bowl commercials
are not always given as much credit as they deserve for grasping the American
mood. Their most interesting ads can't be taken at face value. For example, who
could forget - although Holiday Inn seems to have tried - the 1997
class-reunion ad in which a hot babe struts through the party, chest out, her
blond hair swinging, as a voice-over ticks off the part-by-part cost of her
cosmetic surgery make-over? The message: her make-over involves mere thousands
of dollars, compared to the millions Holiday Inn has spent on renovations. You
must remember the tagline: she's finally recognized by a former classmate who
sputters, "Bob ... Bob Johnson?"
So what were the Mads telling us here? If pricey renovations were acceptable
for corporations, they were also acceptable for ordinary people? That Holiday
Inn going upscale was no different from transitioning genders? Or, by
extension, that anything a corporation can do, you can, too? In other words,
corporate privilege equals personal agency.
And this was 13 years before the Supreme Court decided to extend individual
freedom of expression to corporations. (Extraneous note: "freedom of
expression" is now a tagline for a Botox treatment.)
The Snickers smack
In 2007, when a General Motors ad showed a robot committing suicide after
making an assembly-line mistake, the message seemed unclear (unless this was a
Philip K Dick dream). Shouldn't it be the car-maker, in traditional Japanese
fashion, who commits hara-kiri after years of colossal mistakes? But now we
understand: it was an early warning - the American worker was at the end of the
line; no handouts, pal, you're on your own.
That was the same year when two men, simultaneously eating a Snickers bar,
first touched lips during a Super Bowl game. When I initially saw it, I
thought: if anything can conquer homophobia, it's chocolate. But then they did
the I'm-not-gay double take and began tearing off chest hair in a "manly"
display.
The Mads had struck again, brilliantly reinforcing my own impression as a
sportswriter that the NFL is the most homophobic, yet homoerotic, of team
sports. With all that touching and hugging in public (and all that naked
horseplay in the locker-room), no wonder some players have reacted with such
hostility to the few who have come out after retirement. That Super Bowl ad
will be at least an hour's lecture in someone's Queer Studies course.
Because of their insecure young male demographic, ads tend to be so
aggressively and cartoonishly hetero that 1) there is no orientation issue, and
2) there is no threat of actually having to perform. You can watch sexy women
the same way you watch football players - from a superior remove.
For example, in last year's commercial for GoDaddy.com, the domain-name
company, three nerds found they could control events from their laptop. Not
only did they make Danica Patrick, an Indy driver, take a shower for them, but
they added "that German woman from the dean's office".
This year, Danica gets to flashdance and dress up like Marilyn Monroe. GoDaddy
is known for ads, run relentlessly on the Internet, that are too risque and
provocative for the networks.
In this Sunday's CareerBuilder spot, a cubicle clown ostentatiously farts,
annoying a prim female co-worker. When the boss walks up, she thinks the jerk
is cooked. But the boss lends the jerk his lighter to ignite the fumes. He
wants the lighter back, he says; one imagines him farting, too.
Hey, boys will be boys. If she can't take the heat let her go back to the
kitchen. After all, this is 2010!
If it wasn't in such company, I would be more concerned about Tim Tebow's Focus
on the Family commercial. I'd angst away: What does it really mean? What are
the Mads telling us about the future? That the country is turning back toward
the right? That the networks, in their twilight, need every buck they can get
and don't care where it comes from? That Tebow, who has always seen football as
his pulpit to spread evangelical Christianity, is presaging a new era of star
athletes standing for causes?
None of the above. It's a hopeful message. Obama centrism will prevail,
stabilize the country, and prepare it for progressive reform, because even
football fans will understand that Super Bowl sideshows - be they about
voyeuristic horndogs, flatulent slackers, star quarterbacks, or God knows how
many holy day trippers jamming down food-like products and loser liquids - can
be taken seriously only on Sunday. (Now, that may be the Philip K Dick dream.)
Robert Lipsyte, a former New York Times sports columnist, is host of the
PBS show on boomer aging,LIFE
(Part2). His memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter, will be
published in August by HarperCollins.
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