A friend asked me which Superbowl ads I liked best. The very idea of advertising rubs me the wrong way, even though I grant the necessity — have I not plugged my own blogs here and there around the internets? Still, watching and critiquing Superbowl ads has become a tradition, and who am I to buck tradition?
Here’s what I told my friend:
I made Buffalo wings and we watched the game, but I wasn’t paying close attention. Never having been good at ball sports as a kid, I don’t have any interest in them as an adult. Superbowl’s the exception, simply because it is what one does on Superbowl Sunday.
I blogged about the pre-game performance of two national anthems. Other bloggers were hung up on Christine Aguilera’s botched performance of the Star Spangled Banner (doesn’t anyone remember Roseanne Barr screwing it up even worse?), and some questioned the $450,000 flyover by Navy F-18s (seeing as how the stadium roof was closed at the time). But the blogosphere at large has yet to cotton to the fact that we have passively allowed the right to impose two national anthems upon us. I’m out ahead of the pack on this one.
The ads I remember are the ones with the kid in the Darth Vader costume, the super-creepy one where the guy sucks another guy’s fingers, and the burly man who starts using a credit card for womanly purchases and winds up a drag queen. Kinda surprised the last two got through televised sport’s manliness filters.
Speaking of filters . . . ever notice how TV advertising talks around bodily functions? Curiously, you can say diarrhea, but you can’t say “bowel movement.” That, right there, is probably what defines American TV advertising . . . not calling a spade a spade, or in this case, a turd.
Witness the horrible advertising campaign for a product called Philips Colon Health. The ad I’m thinking of is so awful no one has even posted it to YouTube, but a fellow blogger, Ian J. Spector, took the trouble to transcribe it:
INT: BOOKSTORE
Camera pans past a row of books. LEAD FEMALE is reading to a group of women from the box of PHILLIPS’ COLON HEALTH the way an author performs a book reading.LEAD FEMALE: She felt lost until the combination of three good probiotics in PHILLIPS’ COLON HEALTH defended against the bad gas, diarrhea, and constipation.
YUPPIE BLONDE FEMALE (desperately): And?
LEAD FEMALE (excitedly, while leaning in and touching the other woman’s forearm): It helped balance her colon!
BLACK FEMALE (with head movement and finger pointing): Ooh, now that’s the best part.
YUPPIE BLONDE FEMALE: I love your work.
VOICEOVER: Phillips’ Colon Health.
“Balanced colon,” indeed! I never thought I’d see a bodily function ad more cringeworthy than this:
Oh, well, at least it was honest!