They pretty much feel like regular ads now. Doesn't help that they go on to run them elsewhere afterwards too so they aren't even exclusive anymore.
Feels weird to be reminiscing about ads, but they really did use to be entertaining.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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it used to be an opportunity for creatives to spread their wings with a larger budget. but the "optimization" of capitalism removes all the magic
just like 'black friday'. once it hit mainstream with lots of media and news coverage, it went to shit.
"Black Friday" was just a day well-established as a popular shopping day, due to it being a day off industrial and office workers had in the run-up to Christmas.
The "Black Friday / Cyber Monday Sale" was always a clearance sale. The stuff you were getting "for cheap" was inevitably products that the store needed off the shelves before they pulled out the next line of high-demand kitche. So you could get clothes a year out of fashion or electronics a step behind the curve. But the store wouldn't restock this stuff because it was inevitably the last bits they still had in inventory.
This - combined with hypersensational news coverage of "Incredible Unbelievable DEALS!" - sparked a slew of deadly crowd crushes that created the impression of sales so amazing people would die for them. But it was always just clearance sales, with the occasional scam or flim-flam thrown in. Once savvy consumers started to notice the degraded state of the merchandise and more conservative retail shoppers saw the crowd crush as a scary hazard rather than a bandwagon to climb aboard, the sensationalist news coverage dimmed and the marketing strategies changed.
But the rise and fall of "Black Friday" was never actually about it going to shit. It was always shit. It just took time for retail shoppers to notice.
Doesn’t help that they go on to run them elsewhere afterwards too so they aren’t even exclusive anymore.
If you watch the playoffs (or sometimes even the late season), most of the commercials are also aired during that. It's like an additional penalty for the folks who actually follow the game.
Anyone else sick of snoop doggy dogg's sellout ass on every other commercial? I know I am.
I would simply not watch broadcast television. Haven't seen Snoop Doggy in nearly a decade.
they need more owls
Superb ones.
I’m surprised no one has used this old reddit / lemmy joke in an actual Super Bowl ad yet. I kind of feel like they have?
It was also used in a TV show, "What We Do in the Shadows" - although I haven't seen it myself yet.
Oh is the superbowl coming up? I've seen more than one meme about it
Yes. It's about a year away
Damn thats really close I didn't know
At this point, if I see or come across any commercial and I can't turn them off with ad blockers or any other method ..... I use the MUTE BUTTON.
I always used to do that with cable TV in the 90s, now I'm using this more often again.
Also serial muter... I call commercials "ear cancer".
I wish someone could come up with a 'commercial silencer button' ... a mute button that would mute the audio but also dim the video by 50% ... then when you unmuted, audio comes back and so does full brightness.
Yes, and I pull up the TV settings menu to cover most of the screen so my kids can't watch muted commercials, either.
I feel the same way, but intuitively I feel like that's just nostalgia brain talking. "Everything was better back in my day" Even when it wasn't
I'm old enough to have seen both the rise and fall of super bowl ads. And I can tell you that they definitely have gone to shit. At one point they were just regular commercials. Then a few innovative commercials caused real buzz and so more started upping their game. But now we have reached the point of enshitification where only brands with insane advertising budgets and can even afford to do commercials. But even those budgets have limits, and between the cost of the spot and the cost of a celebrity they have to cut costs somewhere. And all that matters is the celebrity saying the brand right?
I noticed that this actually varies depending on the target demographic.
- The ads targeting the boomers had virtually zero celebrity cameos, and focused on tugging on the heartstrings in some way. The quintessential example was one of a boomer using some Kia SUV's ultra bright headlights illuminate a frozen pond so their daughter can go figure skating
- The ads targeting Gen X featured celebrities, but still mainly focused on the products themselves. The quintessential example was that Sketchers slip on ad with Mr T.
- The ads that targeted millennials were basically just some lame attempt at humor by a celebrity, and then the company logo slapped at the end. The quintessential example was an ad for home insurance that was just Turk and JD goofing around.
- The ads that targeted Gen Z women were massive virtue signals with a huge sense of self importance. The quintessential example was that fucking soda ad that acted like it was solving the obesity crisis.
- The ads that targeted Gen Z men were just a bunch of goofy bullshit. The quintessential example was that oreos as with the Trojan horse
Can someone explain to me why people get excited for the advertisements and a truncated concert during a sporting event? Just seems like crass commercialism to me
Yes, but they used to put effort into their crass commercialism. Now it's just people seeing how much money they can waste on pointless bullshit, and everyone watches because of inertia and nostalgia.
my guess is that a lot of people find the ads more entertaining than the sport, and it’s fairly common to have big super bowl parties. so you get a lot of people watching something that they might not be all that interested in and the commercials are a break from that.
Football is boring as fuck but a lot of people get pressured into watching it due to social obligations. Ads can be 30-60 second short films that are entertaining in their own right, especially in comparison to the boring as fuck game. Superbowl ads are more likely to be the entertaining type because the ad space is the most expensive in the world.
Football is boring as fuck
Things become more engaging as you learn about them. Baseball, bowling, US History, math, gardening, opera, coin collecting... the more you learn about it, the more interesting it gets.
The folks who are really into football tend to have stories they know about key players and coaches, the evolution of certain plays, and the history of the arenas that make watching a particular game or series of plays more engaging in context. Folks who are tuning into the Super Bowl without really following the season or cheering for a local team that made it to the Big One are picking up a drama in the last chapter. And if they don't know the plays or the players or the stakes or the underlying drama around the various franchises, of course they aren't going to be interested in the conclusion.
Its like picking up a copy of Romeo + Juliet, flipping to the last six pages, and saying "Shakespeare sucks, who cares if a couple of teenagers kill themselves?"
It is the yearly reapplication of the spell that watching a bunch of buff men hump each other in the ass and grope each other in a pile is in no way homoerotic and the concert and advertisements prove it. See honey: it's about music and celebrities.
Murica. Capitalist hellhole. That's it.
Wassup!
Kids these days.
Back in my day ads used to mean something!