The Super Bowl was played last Sunday, and Taylor Swift and the Kansas City Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers in overtime in a game that took more than a half to get really interesting. Both teams took turns turning the ball over and exchanging punts before halftime. Speaking of halftime, the show featured Usher and several notable guest appearances, and while entertaining, was still considered safe and boring by many fans.
Besides the game and the halftime show, the commercials also featured more humor than usual, but also some weird, woke moments as well. The annual big-budget advertising event had veered off course in recent years, eschewing the fun and flirty ads of the past for more woke, serious issues, mainly putting off the viewing public in the process.
The biggest podcaster in the world, Joe Rogan, talked about the Super Bowl ad campaign on his podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” on Tuesday, calling it “a gigantic propaganda campaign.” Rogan was interviewing Dr. Bret Weinstein when the subject of the Super Bowl came up. As always, Rogan was quick to give his opinions.
Rogan, who admittedly didn’t watch the game, said: “I did not watch the Super Bowl but I got a ton of messages from people that watched it that were like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Like, the Super Bowl was a gigantic propaganda campaign. There’s Pfizer ads and weird woke commercials.” Rogan may have been the only person not watching the big game, as the ratings have been reported as the highest in Super Bowl history.
There were several fun ads, including Ben Affleck, Tom Brady, Matt Damon, and Jennifer Lopez in a Dunkin ad, and Arnold Schwarzenegger taking a turn as a State Farm spokesperson, but beyond those were mostly junk-food ads from Pepsi and other snack makers, ads from big pharma, and a desperate attempt by Bud Light to undo the damage done by the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco.
Pfizer, the creator of one of the COVID-19 vaccines, did a 60-second spot, and Astella did a spot for a menopause drug, signaling the acknowledgment by the drugmaker that women are also tuned in to the Super Bowl. This year didn’t just feature ads for electric vehicles and soda, however. There were a few weird, woke ads as well.
Advertisers realize what a cash cow the Super Bowl is and will happily spend upwards of $7 million dollars for a 30-second spot, and with a reported 123 million viewers, who can blame them? Even the Chinese online retailer Temu ran three ads for their site. That is $21 million dollars in advertising for a company under fire for allegedly using forced labor.
It was a hodgepodge of ads, ranging from the funny to the woke, including He Gets Us, which advertised Jesus by displaying woke images such as a cop on his knees washing a black man’s feet and a priest doing the same with a gay man. Data hasn’t been released yet determining if any of these ads were effective, but at least some of them were a nice distraction from Taylor Swift and a largely boring game.
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