Review: Is the Super Bowl more than just football?
by Patrick Cleary ’24, A&E Contributor
Like many of you, I sat down and watched the Super Bowl broadcast the other night. You have probably already heard about how the Rams were able to overcome the obstacles of a crushing pandemic, brutal injuries and referees with bets on the side to secure a Lombardi Trophy for the nation’s least engaged football fanbase.
But what really matters is everything outside the game. No, I’m serious. The average primetime NFL game draws around 17 million viewers. That sounds impressive until you realize the Super Bowl regularly cracks 100 million. For millions of viewers, this is the time they care about football. Advertisers realize this; that is why companies pay millions for 30 seconds on screen during one of the few nights everyone in the country is watching.
We must ask ourselves: what do these ads say about America? How do they show where we as a country are going? Who was this for?
The most common product categories were cryptocurrencies and electric cars. We finally saw an end to the onslaught of smart speakers from companies like Amazon or Facebook which we have seen in recent years. I think in a year where we couldn’t even get Americans to trust the safety of vaccines or the sanctity of elections, corporate America decided it was time to pull back on the devices that hear everything you say and report back to their corporate overlords.
But even with all of the new tech on display, the Super Bowl ads were a stage to display new tech using a filter of the past to help ease the transition. We saw a 2022 LeBron James speaking to a CGI teenaged version of himself to promote Crypto.com, a platform to trade cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Later, we had HBO’s The Sopranos’s opening being remixed to show off an electrified Chevy Silverado. Then, comedian Mike Myers reprised his role as Dr. Evil for an ad for General Motors about their commitment to electric vehicles and the environment.
In these two cases, companies are trying to upend the status quo of two age old institutions: automobiles and banking. The idea that you plug your car into the wall or that you’re using a currency backed by bits and bytes, not banks, is still scary to many. That’s why you use the biggest stage of the year to introduce them. That is why you use big celebrities (James and Myers). And that is why you ground it in nostalgia. As these new concepts are grounded in the past, people are more comfortable with them.
This nostalgia-centric approach was also found in the halftime show. Instead of the traditional, broad appeal current pop act like Justin Timberlake in 2018 or Katy Perry in 2015, the halftime show was headlined by a series of hip hop artists that rose to prominence in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. These included 50 Cent, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar. This is not the first time that the performance has pandered to the past: just look at Sir. Paul McCartney in 2005 or Bruce Springsteen in 2009. They were legendary artists, but still acts that had peaked in popularity decades ago and used the halftime show as a celebration of their past works. The difference this year is that 2022 was a celebration of Hip Hop and Black culture. This indicates a shifting in popular culture. Hip Hop is no longer the controversial, revolutionary art form that prompted bans and censorship in the early 90s. Now, for the aging millennials that this show targeted, this is the mainstream. This has a great deal of implications.
For Hip Hop, I think it symbolizes a maturing for the genre, as it is now old enough for people to be nostalgic for artists like 50 Cent and Eminem. Snoop Dogg is probably better known now as a general celebrity than for the music that made him famous. I think it is healthy that mainstream culture recognizes the artistry that was too often ignored when these artists first arose. However, there is also a dark side. Hip Hop as a genre is also tied to historic injustices felt by African Americans and people living in inner cities suffering from institutional racism and neglect. If this casualization continues, those deeper meanings could be lost in favor of the commercial and the acceptable.
Or, maybe not. It was reported that the NFL did not want Eminem to kneel at the start of his performance in support of Quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police violence that got him blacklisted by the league. He did anyway. Maybe this offers a sign of hope for the country, and that this performance was just the first step of many.
To close this out, I want to answer that question I raised above. Who was this show for? The Super Bowl, because it has the largest audience, also has the most diverse audience, and yet the choices made about the commercials and the halftime show indicate a clear focus. This year, the goal of advertisers and the NFL was to win over aging millennials. People with enough disposable income for things like crypto or electric cars, people that care about the environment and embrace technology. People that grew up listening to the rap records that their parents detested, that they made mainstream. The shift in target audience is important as it indicates that corporate America is shifting its attention from the Baby Boomer generation towards the diverse, tech-centric millennials. What else will this entail? We shall see.
