Ah, the Super Bowl. The biggest event of the year for many sports fans. The best of the gridiron pitted against one another in the ultimate football game.
Although the Super Bowl is an event viewed as an intense and honorable athletic competition, it is also a monument to consumerism. This year, companies shelled out about $2.1 million for a mere 30 seconds of advertising glory. In the quest for product awareness, the Super Bowl is the Holy Grail.
We, the so-called MTV generation, don't have a very long collective attention span. Not much could be more appealing than 30-second snippets and one-joke ponies priced in the millions to further coerce us into succumbing to almighty capitalism.
Commercials give added incentive to tune in for the big game, finance junior Carrie Matteson said, while watching the game among dozens of football fans at a Super Bowl party on Spartan Avenue.
"Sometimes commercials are more exciting," Matteson said. "Football is an all right time, but it's no Bud Light commercial."
Members of the MSU advertising faculty, who hold an annual party on Super Bowl Sunday to rate the best and worst of the new commercials, said they were unimpressed with this year's crop.
"I think we're a tough crowd because we do it every year," said advertising Assistant Professor Carrie La Ferle. "There's, of course, ones that people really like. Still on the whole, it's pretty average."
Sierra Mist and Bud Light were the two standouts of the bunch. The campaign for Pepsi's answer to Sprite managed to grab good laughs with commercials featuring a dog dismantling a fire hydrant in its owner's face and zoo monkeys escaping into the polar bear tank. Sure, it was a bit cutesy, but I always appreciate seeing some moron get blasted into a brick wall.
Bud Light took similar comic approaches with a very funny series of commercials, the highlight being a plethora of butt-related humor and a pseudo-suave preppy guy trying and failing to pick up chicks on the beach.
Budweiser wins this year's coveted award for the Ultimate Depiction of Male Sexual Utopia with a short clip featuring beer, an attractive woman, the guy she loves, his dilemma of loving her roommate and the phrase "Why don't you date both of us." Thanks, oh King of Beers, for instilling hope in us all.
FedEx scored points with their ad featuring a Tom Hanks "Cast Away" type returning a package he found on his desert island. When he asks what was in it, the scraggly and skinny employee is shown a GPS system and a satellite phone.
But for every good commercial there are countless bad ones. These are the commercials that make you groan with annoyance as one celebrity sells out and another tries to make some quick cash.
Apparently, there is a piece of money that Michael "Triple Retirement Please Go Away" Jordan hasn't touched, because the well-respected athlete decided to do an underwear ad with Jackie Chan and a Gatorade clip with three younger versions of himself. At least he didn't show up with any of the Looney Toons to hock something such as Tampax.
Perhaps the biggest shock came from government-sponsored anti-substance ads featuring, among other idiotic things, a subway full of people killed indirectly by drug sales. The ads failed to resonate, instead inspiring eyes to roll and minds to wonder how the government can afford a Super Bowl spot when there are hungry people on the streets - instead of feeding them, our money goes to a senseless short about kids getting run over by stoners.
And so goes another year of scantily-clad women, humor, movie previews, SUVs, drunk people and football. Sports and brainwashing mixed with a huge demographic of people with an excuse to drink on a Sunday. It'd be hard to find a better combo.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A.P. Kryza, State News film reporter, can be reached at kryzaand@msu.edu.
