Yes, it's that time of year again: time for Super Bowl Semiotics, advertising division. And as I contemplate this year's rather uninspiring, and uninspired, lineup, I find myself realizing that the ads were more significant for what they didn't say (or do) than for what they did—like Sherlock Holmes' dog that didn't bark in the night. Here's why.
To start with, one dog that didn't bark this time around was a real dog: that is, after a couple of high-profile puppy-themed ads in the recent past (Budweiser's "Puppy Love" ad from Super Bowl 48 was a hit, while GoDaddy's parody the following year was a disaster—you can find complete analyses of both in the 9th edition of Signs of Life), Madison Avenue decided to let this sleeping dog lie for once, along with the ever-popular cute animal theme overall. I expect to see it come back next year (or soon thereafter) however: cute animals are good salespeople in America.
Of course, there was a fair share of comedy in the lineup (yuks sell stuff too), and the consensus appears to be that the comic ads from Tide took the prize for Best Ads in a Sponsoring Role. The Tide ads, of course, borrowed a page from the Energizer company, whose Energizer Bunny ads—first aired in 1989—employ a sophisticated advertising strategy that is essentially self-reflexive, parodying existing campaigns for other products, and, in so doing, appealing to an audience that has been so super saturated with advertising gimmicks that it has become skeptical of advertising in general.
But the big story of Super Bowl 52 was the relative lack of politically themed ads. Given the way that social politics—from #oscarssowhite to #metoo—have been playing such a prominent role in America's popular cultural main events recently, this may appear to be a surprising omission, but not when we consider how the NFL has been witness to an entire season of political protests that have tied it up in the sort of controversies it is not well equipped to handle. And given the ruckus that an immigration-themed Super Bowl ad made last year, one can see why politics was not on the agenda.
Not taking the hint, however, the ad folks at Dodge thought that they could enter the political fray in a way that would make everyone happy . . . and fell flat on their face with their Martin Luther King, Jr. spot. Dr. King, as at least one critic of the ad has put it, wasn't talking about trucks. In fact, as some careful readers of the actual MLK speech that Dodge appropriated have noted, King was warning his audience precisely against the power of advertising. Um, maybe a little learning is a dangerous thing.
In my view, the ad folks at Dodge tripped up in yet another way during the night, though I don't think that anyone else has noticed this. I refer here to the Vikings-take-Minneapolis Ram truck spot, which took a group of actual Icelanders—dressed up as medieval Viking raiders—from Iceland to Minneapolis in a thoroughly juiced-up journey, all set to Queen's "We Will Rock You." Now, some Minnesota Viking fans have taken the ad as some sort of dig at the football team, but I think the real story parallels what I've been writing here about the Thor movies. All those ferocious blondes, cruisin' for a bruisin' . . . . I don't want to press the matter, but I don't think that this is really a good time to so aggressively display what can only be called a demonstration of raw "white power."
Perhaps the biggest story of all, however, is that no ad really made that much of an impact. Oh, there are (as always) lists of favorites to be found all over the Net, but nothing really broke through the ad clutter in any big way. At five million dollars for thirty seconds of exposure (the cost seems to go up by a tidy million every year), that's something of an anti-climax, but perhaps that's as it should be. After all, there is still a football game somewhere behind all this, and, as games go, it was quite a good game.
Credit: “2018 Super Bowl LII Minnesota Banner – Minneapolis” by Tony Webster on Flickr 1/27/18 via Creative Commons 2.0 license.
