OUR VIEW: Beer ads, abortion ads, banned ads (vote in poll)
It's all part of Super Bowl Sunday 2010
Beer. Animal rights. Abortion. Uniform resource locators. All-male dating services. Buxom women. All with some football thrown in. Happy Super Bowl Sunday.
The Super Bowl is one of America’s favorite holidays, though it’s not technically a holiday, and most celebrants could not care less who’s playing. That’s partly because the Super Bowl provides us with entertaining ads and ads that spark debates. Typically, Super Bowl ads go straight for our emotions. They are hysterically funny, or sexy, or heartwarming — providing water cooler discussion fodder for the following week.
The ads remind us of how great this country is, and how much wealth is produced in an environment where humans are free to pursue riches by risking failure. Belching frogs remind us to buy Budweiser. GoDaddy shows us how something as mundane as selling uniform resource locators, or URLs, can be irresistibly sexy. Mean Joe Greene warmed our hearts in the ’70s, showing us how Coca Cola could make friends of the world’s most menacing defensive tackle and an unknown 10-year-old fan.
The Super Bowl is that rare TV occasion in which the ads, quite possibly, get more attention than the show they’re paying for.
And every year the Super Bowl provides us with advertising controversies.
The only thing more fun than Super Bowl ads are the banned Super Bowl ads available on YouTube and other Internet sites. Some organizations produce ads designed to get banned.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals produced a famous ad that never aired, featuring an attractive woman doing sexy things with vegetables.
Producing an ad to get banned is a brilliant strategy for an organization that can’t spend millions to air an ad, but can draw viewers to Internet videos with the attention that surrounds a network’s decision to ban a questionable or distasteful ad. This year, and in recent years past, GoDaddy has produced ads it intends to broadcast and ads the company’s executives must know are too racy to air.
This year’s banned GoDaddy ad features a fictitious NFL retiree named Lola, who begins cross-dressing and starts an online business to sell lingerie (presumably for big strong men with a feminine side).
Another of this year’s banned ads is for KGB, a company we can text questions to for immediate answers. The ad features two men who had been arguing about global warming, each with his head stuck up his behind.
(Please vote in poll to the right. Must vote to see results. Thanks!)
A banned Doritos ad features a man who accidentally backs his car into a female pedestrian. In his rearview mirror, he sees that the prostrate victim has dropped her bag of chips. He then backs the car over the victim in order to reach out of the driver’s side door and grab her Doritos.
The best-known advertising controversy of 2010 comes from right here in Colorado Springs. Focus on the Family has produced two anti-abortion Super Bowl ads that purportedly feature Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and a story that he would have been killed by abortion if his mother had followed a doctor’s advice.
As of Friday afternoon, CBS had resisted mounting pressure from abortion-rights advocates to ban the ads. If they air, be sure to thank CBS for agreeing to air a controversial message. While you're at it, suggest the network stop banning Super Bowl ads altogether – with the exception of those which are clearly obscene. What’s obscene? We can only rely on that perfect definition handed down by the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: “I can’t define it, but... I know it when I see it.”
Americans are perfectly capable of handling controversial and provocative material, including the most outrageous ads by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and men-on-men dating sites. Let the viewers decide which advertisers to reward and which ones to ignore. — Wayne Laugesen, editorial page editor, for the editorial board
