You aren't a rock star
A Super Bowl commercial told me so.
I grew up in a house where sports was king, but then I raised sons in a house where sports were meh. I don’t know how that happened, but I didn’t want them to go to school after big sporting events (like Sunday’s Super Bowl) with no clue about what just happened.
So every year, I laid out a big spread and while we didn’t watch the game, per se, we became experts on Super Bowl commercials. Back then, you could buy a Super Bowl commercial for $1 million and change and my, have times have changed. A 30-second commercial from Sunday would run you about $7 million. I suppose when you have hundreds of million of eyes on the screen, you want to put out your best.
Of course, Sunday’s game was one of the record books so it is completely understandable if you tuned in to watch the commercials and got hooked on the game. These were two evenly-matched teams and it was just beautiful, and yes, my Kansas City team won on a beautiful field goal, so yeah, life is beautiful, just beautiful.
Did I mention it was beautiful? I yelled myself hoarse.
Still, one of my favorite ads from Sunday is posted above. Then there was this:
I wanted to love this one, but the organization behind this ad campaign has some significant ties to anti-LGBTQ, pro-conservative-Christian causes, so nah. You never want to take something at face value, even if the message is set to cool music.
Did you have a favorite ad?
Oh, and this: Go KC!
Bradley Cooper’s ad with his tiny mom was charming. And good for Rihanna. She looked so beautiful pregnant up there.
When I was fifteen I spent the summer hitchhiking around the country (you could do that back then). The Unification Church was particularly active with a recruiting strategy that at times bordered on kidnapping. Given my age and appearance, I fit a runaway profile and was targeted by them in half a dozen cities. These commercials are an eerie reminder of their approach back then. It was subtle, friendly and persistent based on the assumption that I was scared and lonely. It was always a young man and woman. They’d walk along for awhile asking questions and making comments that were hard to disagree with, usually followed by an offer join them for a meal or to hang out at this “cool place with kids like you”. I knew who they were and they’d usually give up when they realized they couldn’t get their hooks in although a couple of times I had to get confrontational to run them off. These “He gets us” folks seem just as insidious.