Super Bowl ads fall well short of game

It isn’t enough that the Super Bowl is a culmination of an NFL season where every national game won its night in the television ratings, the year’s biggest telecast — which is said to have amassed 114.4 million viewers, surpassing last year’s record 111.5 million and making the most-watched show in U.S. history — is also a lesson in manliness, of what it’s like to be a dad, of hugs and puppies and trying to keep that cute kid from dying.

A look at the advertising that filled the three-plus-hour telecast, where clients paid $4.5 million per 30-second spot, coalesced around no central culturally defining moment. The best of the spots could only offer a couple of chuckles. More often they were alternately excessively mawkish or borderline offensive. 

Pouring a Coke on a computer server may help stop cyber-bullying, one ad suggested (it will, at least, gum up the keyboard). McDonald’s claims it will give you free food if you call your mom and tell her you love her (but maybe leave out the part about doing it to get free McNuggets). 

The NFL’s been under fire all year for its mishandling of domestic violence, so there was a single PSA from the “No More” campaign urging more awareness, with the airtime donated by the league itself. Other than that, Always feminine hygiene products promoted the notion that “throwing like a girl” is not necessarily a bad thing.

But women still served simply as temptations in other ads, from a late-game Victoria’s Secret spot to one where a man uses Doritos to lure a woman to sit next to him on a plane, only to find she has a baby. The audience is meant to feel his disappointment.

But what if he were a dad? The ads have that covered: In one, a racecar-driving dad ignores his son until he picks him up from school in a Nissan one day (the ad used “Cats in the Cradle” as the soundtrack — an off note for some, as Harry Chapin, the song’s writer, died in an auto accident in 1981). In another, we learn that what makes a dad stronger is to show he cares (and to hydrate with Dove).

But where was the dad in the notorious Nationwide ad in the first half? In this 30-second gut punch, a poor boy laments that he’ll never learn to ride a bike, get cooties, learn to fly, travel the world or get married, “cause I died from an accident.” There follows horrible shots of an overflowing bathtub, poisons beneath the kitchen sink and a flatscreen TV that toppled. The collective twittersphere was horrified.