Short Prayer for SUPER BOWL Advertising

A Short Prayer for Advertising - Please bring back great commercials 

By Stephen Marche

Published in the February 2012 issue of Esquire
http://www.esquire.com/features/thousand-words-on-culture/super-bowl-ads-2012-0212 

Top Ten Super Bowl Commercials from 2011

The most valuable time in the world flows through the drab beginning of February. Every second that interrupts what's typically a pretty boring football game [fig. 1] is worth $116,666.67. If you follow the money and influence, the Super Bowl commercials ritual is by far the most important cultural event of the year, even if — along with the parade, the military flybys, the gyrating gristle of Madonna's body — the whole spectacle amounts to a grand nostalgia-fest. What could be more old-fashioned than actual ads? Everywhere else, advertising has become life and life has become advertising. 

There is no outside the ad anymore. Among certain fringe leftists, there are fantasies of an escape from consumerism, but grown-ups know that Adbusters [fig. 2] is a brand. Naomi Klein is a brand, or at least she was when people still listened to her. Socially as well as personally, advertising is going to dominate public life with ever-greater ferocity. The integration of advertising into life is already nearly absolute. It is perfectly normal for Staples to buy plotlines on The Office rather than commercials. And when was the last time you heard a sports commentator on American television make a critical remark about the league he reports on? Howard Cosell would have a very brief career if he were coming up today. Everyone is a part of the promotional machinery, and we are submitting to this machinery in every aspect of our existence. The new self-driving Google car? A blast of ads as you are chauffeured. Musicians in the back of vans? Their albums are ads for their forty-city tours and forty-dollar T-shirts. The Huffington Post? The single most destructive force for intellectuals since the first Emperor of China because it convinces writers that their writing is really advertising for themselves. Poets and playwrights and sculptors now talk about brand dissemination via Twitter — that's the level of deluded advertisement obsession we've attained. 

You don't have to occupy Wall Street to understand that this development is toxic. Advertising works: Why do you think Americans are so fat and in debt? A world of hyperadvertising in which advertising dominates the basic functions of living will obviously be a world of hyperconsumption. We've blamed the bankers and the government for the inability of Americans to keep within sustainable limits, but everything ordinary people do, from walking down the street to sending an e-mail, tells them either overtly or clandestinely to spend more. Open culture — the information-wants-to-be-free utopia of Web 2.0 — is not some grand achievement of intellectual or artistic freedom. It's merely the apotheosis of advertisement. 

Ironically, as advertising intrudes more and more surreptitiously into every aspect of life, it loses its once-essential glamour. The triumphal march of advertising is also its squalid little funeral. There are people in advertising as brilliant as any who have ever been, but their visions have to be funneled into increasingly boring and diffuse modes that are cheaper and stupider. The campaign for Old Spice [fig. 3] was a flash of genius, but it also required hundreds of iterations on YouTube with the quality of gonzo pornography. 

Ads have always been a bastard art form, looked down on by their proper artistic cousins. But as social-media companies dream of a world in which the persuasion is so subtle and insidious and constant and perfectly pitched that the distinction between a brand and an identity dissolves entirely, advertising has become too essential to life to treat so casually or contemptuously. Clemenceau purportedly said that war is too important to be left to the generals. Advertising has become too important to be left to Google and Twitter and Foursquare. It is now every bit as vital to the general quality of life as architecture, possibly more so. For its own sake and for everybody else's, it has to come out of the shadows. 

The Super Bowl offers the possibility of a new relationship with advertising, one that's different from the game of hide-and-seek we usually play. It runs against the tendency for naked pleas to become grainy and peripheral. It puts advertising at the center and asks: Which are the good ads and products and which are the bad ads and products? And thus it serves the same function today as the great medieval trade festivals and the World's Fairs of the early twentieth century: providing chances for the marketplace to indulge in fantasies of industrial possibility. 

But much more than that, it's a chance to develop taste. It's a chance to see ourselves as we are and to confront our cravings and habits for what they are. Advertising can be magnificent as surely as it can be annoying. In the name of beer and candy, every February we receive a Hieronymus Bosch panorama of our time: middle-class grade-school Darth Vaders, nacho ninjas, smooth redheaded teachers in metanarrative car chases, gang-tackled octogenarian celebrities, pasty guys with potbellies in need of pants, washed-up rappers contemplating the fate of the postindustrial American empire, Gothic kids with eyebrows that dance along to eighties music, babies who discuss market volatility. Is there a more accurate portrait of the inner life of the United States in 2012 [fig. 4]? And all for the price of watching.