Column:

Super Bowl is no place for a serious ad

By Charles Austin

Published Feb. 9, 2010

Wow. What a Super Bowl, huh?

We saw more than 14,000 yards of combined offense, a record-breaking 15 touchdown passes by Peyton Manning and the unforgettable fourth quarter appearance of Brett Favre and his game-winning touchdown pass to Marques Colston, after Drew Brees was tragically mauled by a live tiger mascot with only minutes left to play.

All right.

The Super Bowl hasn't actually aired as I'm writing this, but I feel like I've already seen it, or at least part of it.

As we all know, the Super Bowl is for TV what the Bizarro World is for Superman. The rules that dictate our normal behavior toward TV are completely flipped, and by some miracle of advertising, we actually want to see as many commercials as possible.

When I think of Super Bowl ads, I think of animals shilling for beer and seductive women shilling for just about everything else. But this year, conservative advocacy group Focus on the Family and University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow bought 30 seconds of our Sunday to espouse an abortion rights opponent agenda, in lieu of another Budweiser ad in which frogs and Clydesdales espouse their pro-beer agendas.

I question the efficacy of a serious message during the Super Bowl, but the outrage over this anti-abortion rights commercial seems unwarranted, and if anything it only helped to validate the commercial's appearance.

The Super Bowl is a horrible forum for a serious discussion.

Although it's true people are uncharacteristically excited to watch commercials during the game, to think that an anti-abortion rights advertisement would be particularly effective ignores what people are expecting from Super Bowl ads. Sandwiching a meaningful message between ads for Miller Lite and GoDaddy.com is only likely to undermine the urgency and seriousness of the message.

Super Bowl viewers are much more likely to be moved by that incessant, talking eTrade baby than anything Focus on the Family has to say about babies.

If the ad didn't garner any public outrage from the pro-abortion rights groups, it would have been a complete flop. Most people already have a stance on abortion, and a poorly placed 30-second ad isn't likely to justify its $2.6 million price tag.

But the fact that people became outraged over the commercial (before they had even seen it) helped to launch the discussion out of the comically inadequate realm of football into the (slightly) more serious realm of political discourse. By respecting Focus on the Family's First Amendment right to deliver messages to disinterested audiences, incensed anti-abortion rights advocates could have allowed Focus on the Family to look tactless for trying to politicize a sporting event.

But now, and I'm sure Focus on the Family had calculated it this way, part of that $2.6 million is justified by the media coverage the ad received before it even aired. The media and outraged anti-abortion rights advocates provided free ad space the Super Bowl spot never could have. In this way, the ad hardly needed to air. The discussion on news shows was more valuable than the commercial itself, in terms of reaching the appropriate audience in the appropriate place.

I imagine by the time you read this, the Tim Tebow ad will be less topical than, say, an ad featuring a trained monkey skateboarding over a collection of priceless Picasso paintings into a giant vat of Cool Ranch Doritos.

But if I'm wrong and people are still more interested in a serious ad than the average comical Super Bowl ad, then can we really blame Focus on the Family for injecting a modicum of thought into an environment that usually glorifies beer and submissive women?