The Sports Curmudgeon®

Last year, I did a Topical Rant on the Super Bowl Commercials and it got as much “reader commentary” as anything else. So, why not go back to the well one more time. The thesis goes something like this:

Companies will spend over $2M for a 30-second spot.

Companies will spend up to $10M making the ads.

Therefore, they damned well better be good for that price.

And – best of all – they have to replace some of the lame, boring and annoying ads that are on TV at the moment.

Let’s start with the fundamentals. CBS is charging advertisers $2.3M for a single spot during the game. And the ad slots are sold so don’t there is no need to feel sorry for the folks at CBS. A lot of noise has been made about CBS refusing to air a political ad that opposes President Bush’s policies and actions. I have received at least a half dozen requests to sign an electronic petition to whomever demanding that these ads be shown. I have refused to join in this petition/protest for a completely apolitical reason:

I watch the Super Bowl to watch a football game. I know I am in the minority here and I know that many of the games are real stinkers; but that is what I am there to do.

So when CBS goes to commercial – as they will do a maddening number of times – I merely want them to show the ads and then get back to the game. I do NOT want to be thinking about the profound meaning of what I just saw; I want to be thinking about whether or not the defense ought to blitz on the next snap.

I don’t want to see an ad that is anti-Bush Administration nor do I want to see an ad that hypes the wonderful things that the Bush Administration has been doing for the American people. This is an election year; all that stuff will be sorted out in November.

Another ad that CBS refused to take was one from those wacky folks at PETA who wanted to run an ad to inform us that eating meat makes you impotent. I refuse to get into a debate with PETA folks because they always seem to bring a knife to a gunfight. But if there were any sinister/mercenary motivation going on at CBS, they would have taken that ad from PETA and run it early in the first quarter. Why?

Because then they could have raised the price for three of their other paying sponsors for setting up their products. The Super Bowl will be brought to you this year by Viagra, Levitra and Cialis. PETA sets the table by saying that meat eaters suffer from impotence and these guys come along and tell you how to eat meat and still - - well, you know.

Let’s assume that each of these three magical pill products places only one ad during the game. That means that $6.9M will be spent on things to mollify erectile dysfunction. That’s a significant jump-start to the economy over the inability ability to jump-start - - if you get my drift here.

Who will win this war of the erectile dysfunction aids? That is harder to pick than the outcome of the game but here is a possible indicator. Here are anagrams for the products:

Levitra: “Evil Art” or “I Travel” or “Rev Tail”

Viagra: “Via Rag” or “Rig Ava”

Cialis: “Silica”

None of them are particularly good so this methodology won’t help to pick the winner here. You make the call

I certainly hope that the erectile dysfunction companies have new ad agencies because their ads are getting tiresome and predictable. Have you noticed in all the Viagra ads that after the guy goes and sees his doctor and gets his Viagra prescription, everyone asks him if he got a haircut? They definitely need a fresh approach here and that does not mean that the guy goes to the doctor and then goes to a gathering of people and everyone asks him if he just got his shoes shined. And they need to avoid any imagery that involves setting up a tent in the backyard… Levitra has to come up with something other than the guy in the backyard tossing the football through the tire. Even Sigmund Freud is fed up with that one – and in case you had not heard the news, Freud is still dead.

One ad that is running now needs to be stopped immediately. I don’t care if it does damage to the First Amendment, this needs to be outlawed and the creators put behind bars. Dulcolax stool softener shows an animation of a woman lounging on a sofa and the voice-over informs us that everything in life should be soft and comfortable. That is simply more information that I need to know about this product and that is an annoying play on imagery. I hope that the person who thought that one up is force fed Dulcolax for a week.

Just last night, I saw an ad for the first time for a drug that deals with symptoms of depression. I am not a person who suffers from this condition so I did not pay attention to the name of the product, but I heard the voice-over tell me that some possible side effects are blah-blah-blah anorexia and constipation. Somehow, I don’t think that you would have to deal with both anorexia and constipation at the same time. There is this thing called the Law of Conservation of Matter…Get this off the air.

There is an ad for a watch where the voice-over says, “Nothing says more about you than your wristwatch.” Are you kidding me? In the Viagra commercials, these folks fixate on the guy’s hair not his watch. Get on an elevator with someone who just chowed down at Taco Bell and you may stare at your watch wondering why it is taking so long to get to your floor, but you won’t notice the other person’s watch.

Here is a commercial that needs to have the plug pulled. I won’t describe it; I’ll just answer it:

“No, I don’t know how to use e-bay…”

I am also tired of seeing the kid build a soapbox racer that looks like a Hummer and win the race by going off the road. Hummers make sense if you are in the military and are in a war zone or on maneuvers; Hummers make no sense on the Interstates. Sorry LeBron.

Tell the truth, wouldn’t you love to see a commercial with Jennifer Lopez talking to some of her friends when that damned duck walks up and squawks, “AFLAC”? There are lots of ways to go from there. PETA isn’t going to like any of them.

The Miller Beer commercials where people fall like dominoes is interesting just to watch how they organized the folks and choreographed that act. But the premise delivers a not so good message. All these folks are lined up in banks and on buses and in office buildings – presumably doing something productive during a workday – while the “enlightened Miller Beer drinkers” are bellying up to a bar in mid-day. You can make your own decisions is one possible message. The other is that if you drink Miller Beer you could well wind up out of work and spending your days with a foot on the rail at a bar. I don’t think that is a message that Miller wants to convey.

I have enjoyed the Labatts Blue ads with the guy in the bear suit; I hope they make a new round of them. The one where he makes a beer dispenser out of what was supposed to be a bookcase is good; the one where he gives his date a giant “Pez-machine” that spits out beer cans is hysterical.

The NFL Players Association has several commercial ventures going under the umbrella of Players Inc. If they develop some products one of these days, they could use the Super Bowl to introduce them to the public and I’m sure the networks would cut them a little slack on the price since they are the ones who make the game possible in the most basis sense. Here are a couple of ideas I’ll toss out just for fun – and to prove that I never studied marketing in college:

Players Inc jock itch powder: Call it “Down in the Red Zone’

Players Inc erectile dysfunction pill: Call it “Encroachment”.

Finally, I mentioned a PETA ad earlier on. I suspect that the reason these folks protest the wearing of fur far more vehemently than they protest the wearing of leather is that drenching a stick-figure super-model with red paint is not very dangerous but doing the same thing to a bikers’ convention in Sturgis South Dakota is potentially hazardous to the health of the demonstrator. Do that to a bunch of guys riding their vintage Harleys and the protesters might wish that they were lab animals being treated humanely in the laboratories…

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…