That’s What’s Up

Can we please retire the myth that commercials during the Super Bowl are somehow better than commercials during, say, a three hour "Full House" extravaganza on TV Land?

For years, Fox has feasted on obscene advertising rates for 30 second spots during a sporting event ignored by two thirds of the country. The network has done so because of this absurd belief that Madison Avenue consistently knocks it out of the park on Super Sunday, a belief at least ten years out of date.

Everyone jokes that the Super Bowls in the 1990s, the actual games, sucked. They consisted of blowouts, or games where the final score doesn't indicate how boring the game was (I'm looking at you Super Bowl 31). A large part of this, of course, is thanks to the Buffalo Bills. But somewhere along the way, ad execs started getting creative, and people started paying attention.

After extensive analysis, scientific testing, and rigorous peer review, it has been determined that the myth of Super Bowl ad supremacy was created exactly two seconds after the first Bud Light "whaaaaaassssssssssuuuuuupppp" ad aired, when the first tool mimicked the ad in front of a large, largely drunk crowd in a Dayton, Ohio living room.

It didn't hurt, of course, that for a few years the majority of ads were actually funny, clever, or both. This was the tech bubble era, so most of those companies were figuratively burning money for nothing since they no longer exist. But they did give us a good run.

Now? Gone. The ads just aren't good. They're not funny and they're not clever. Car ads, which for some reason have been making up the majority of Super Bowl commercials for several years running, rarely are funny or clever. Bud Light has been trying way too hard for years; in part they deserve it for foisting that lame whassup campaign on us for years, the lizard ads were just slightly less annoying.

Since this is America, and nobody ever lost money betting against the idiocy of the public, we'll finally start getting the hint that the commercials suck in about ten years. After consulting with numerous oracles, sages, and seers (including the nephew of a collateral heir whose ancestor lived next door to Nostradamus), it has been predicted, as accurately as possible, that the age of Super Bowl Commercial Awesomeness will officially come to an end the first Sunday of February, 2022, when a housewife in Toluca Hills, California will turn to her husband in between the first and second quarters and say "these are terrible, I'm going to watch a movie in the other room."

With any luck, the idea will spread like wildfire (she's in the right part of the country for that term), and by the next morning the media will be declaring the age dead. Fox will fight, but the fight will have already been over. Thankfully.

It'll be a long ten years though.

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