Overrated: Our society requires too much entertainment
The Super Bowl is the ultimate feast day of the commercialization of professional sports.
John Senior, a humanities professor at the University of Kansas, paints the picture of the American’s gross consumption of professional sports. “The armchair quarterback, puffing his gut on insipid American beer and potato chips, gapes like Nero at his gladiators hacking each other up, while his neglected children take up punk rock on their car-cassettes.”
During the middle of the Big Game, a mainstream Hollywood singer stands in the center of the stadium, singing songs about lust, depression, and addiction, while hundreds of look-alike dancers smile too much and a band pretends to play along in the background. Are you not entertained?
But wait, there’s more. In order for every second of the Big Game to be filled with entertainment, even the corporate-generated pauses must intoxicate the viewer. Not with wonder, or joy, or some sort of awe. No. Rather, they must make us laugh for a brief moment, or even better, keep us from thinking about anything at all.
During Super Bowl season, millions of unathletic kids will assert, “I like the Super Bowl for the commercials.” In a futile attempt to be edgy, these kids touch on a real problem with American youth: they are far too easily pleased. Any good child, or human, really, should be asking “Why?” or at least, “What was that?” after every commercial. Because when they ask why, they will begin to understand the unsubstantial conditioning of American television and turn it off.
Commercials are so overrated it hurts. May the Lord keep me from ever choosing a car insurance company based on its slogan. If I am buying car insurance, I want to be spending a little more than 15 minutes making that decision, even if it does save me 15%.
The pain I feel watching vapid sitcom trailers, overstimulating chips ads, Charmin ultra-soft commercials, and especially those Go-Daddy commercials that are really just soft pornography, is so inarticulable I decided instead to create an archetypal 2020 commercial of my own to show you my point.
A black screen. A female narrator with a weirdly grainy voice says softly, “2020 was a pretty crazy year.” Cue stock images of people with masks, protests, and empty stadiums. Voice continues, “We’ve had our fair share of loss.” Cue pictures of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Eddie Van Halen, and Chadwick Boseman. “Of love.” Cue video of a dog hugging a goose or something. “And of laughter.” Cue any TikTok. “But we can get through all of this together.” Final videos of President Joe Biden saying literally anything and Tom Brady kissing his son on the lips. Screen turns to white, and who is the narrator but Ellen DeGeneres. She says something witty like “New Year, new everything.”
“And to make things better, try Energy Drink, fueled to enhance perfection,” she concludes.
If that does not appear in some iteration at least once, I will watch every episode of “The Masked Singer.” That is how sure I am of seeing some nonsensical political indoctrination by irrelevant companies, aggressive celebrity cameos supporting pistachios, and trailers for a new crime sitcom in which the police officer is just a wholesome guy trying to make it in this crazy world. This is a fact of our modern imagination. We require entertainment, and banal entertainment at that, in order to not be bored.
Haley Strack thinks commercials are underrated. How? Why can’t there be a Super Bowl party in which we celebrate a really awesome bowl we have in our kitchen? Maybe it has some character-building scratches, some nostalgic memories. Maybe we require all too much TV, and too little actual community.
Aidan Cyrus is a junior studying philosophy.
Underrated: Advertisements are culturally significant
The Super Bowl advertisement industry is a benchmark of economic performance. Stay with me here.
While some lesser philosophy majors like Aidan Cyrus may not understand the cultural or economic importance of Super Bowl advertisements, I do.
This morning, eight million people woke up in New York City. There was enough coffee and bagels for everyone. Likewise, when people watch the Super Bowl, there are a variety of commercials for all viewers to enjoy.
Much like economists use Gross Domestic Product to keep track of the bagel phenomena that Professor of Economics Gary Wolfram is so fond of, the Super Bowl advertising industry is one of the best indicators of a thriving market.
Super Bowl ads cost $5.6 million for a 30-second commercial. Filled with adorable puppies, picturesque families, and interracial couples, ads are not only creative, but they establish the hierarchical dominance of American companies. Consistently, top-performing businesses, like the Coca-Cola Company, Ford Motor Company, and Apple, air advertisements during the game’s prime-time. If you think these companies are spending millions on advertisements because they’re overrated, you’re wrong.
To Mr. Cyrus’s credit, advertisements are publicly overrated. For good reason, too — they can be crude, overplayed, and redundant. But to look at a billion-dollar industry through the eyes of the public is alarmingly narrow; in terms of economic stimulation, advertisements are extremely undervalued.
Commercials are of higher authority. Of course, some ads are controversial, some are political, and some are outright annoying, but the cultural significance of advertisements outweigh any material substance they portray.
The National Football League is a business. It doesn’t exist for pleasure or excitement, though those are two results of its services. The NFL exists to build profit. The Super Bowl brings billions of dollars in profit to the NFL every year — and luckily, as viewers, we can participate in one of the biggest advertisement industries.
Aren’t you yearning to more fully experience the beauty of capitalism?
We shouldn’t pass off the opportunity to watch Super Bowl commercials as a leisure activity. By watching Super Bowl ads, we’re engaging in civic discourse, contributing to the great system we know as capitalism. It’s foolish to say that Super Bowl ads are overrated. If they were, we wouldn’t need to have this discussion.
This Super Bowl, I encourage you to watch advertisements, not for entertainment value, but to think about the role you’re actively participating in as a member of a great capitalist society.
On Feb. 7, Chipotle’s latest Super Bowl commercial will ask the question: Can a burrito change the world? Take Intro to Political Economy and find out. Until then, don’t assume that Super Bowl ads are anywhere near overrated.
Haley Strack is a sophomore studying political economy. She is an assistant editor for the Collegian.
