By Robert Goldrich
“We had an emotional tenor to the work that was very patriotic, nostalgic. It felt kind of like we were licking our wounds,” said Pete Harvey, partner/creative director at barrettSF in his assessment of this year’s crop of Super Bowl spots.
“With the recession, the economy in recovery, coming out of a war, it was like we could be American again and be proud of that–we saw that reflected in the Budweiser ‘Puppy Love’ spot, Chrysler, and the Budweiser commercial about the soldier coming home,” continued Harvey. “There was a lot of flag waving, an acknowledgement that we’ve come through tough times together. And all of this didn’t seem like all that a deliberate effort. It’s just when you look at the body of spots as a whole, these same emotions came through. It’s quite a departure from the kick-in-the-nuts Bud Light humor. Things this time around were more deeply thoughtful.”
Harvey’s comments caused me to re-think my take on this year’s Big Game ads. While hardly a stellar body of work, there was something comforting about the mix of commercials.
The sophomoric, lowest common denominator and sometimes mean spirited humor of years past was no longer part of the equation.
Indeed there’s something to be said for focusing on what unites us. After all, that’s what the Super Bowl is all about as a medium–a rare, shared experience capturing most of the country’s eyeballs. It’s a far cry from the fragmented media landscape which can insulate us from one another–and even worse at times serve as a spawning ground for polarization.
Divisiveness has become an industry on TV. “News” channel shows that brand the liberals or the conservatives, depending on your political stripes, as ruining America (in part fueling the back and forth on the Coca-Cola Big Game spot “It’s Beautiful”) have grown in prominence, raising the decibel level and diminishing common ground.
Then you have the steady diet of reality series where one clique or person denigrates another, providing an exercise in pettiness, nasty exchanges and materialistic values that serve as sport.
Fragmented media tend to fragment us. So on the Super Sunday that brings viewers together, it’s only fitting that the commercials reflect at least some of the shared values that unite and uplift us.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More