That is an image of Mercedes-Benz’s marketing campaign
involving Che Guevara. That is not from a The Onion article — it was a real
thing which you can read more about HERE.
More on this later.
I have been a fan of sports since the fourth grade.
I was first introduced to the National Basketball Association (N.B.A) by
someone at church which acted as my gateway to baseball which lead me to
football. I love playing and following sports, but the Super Bowl is easily the
most exaggerated event on the planet. It’s less about football and more about
spectacle. I’ve seriously been to “football parties,” although I try to avoid
these now, where the people attending do everything but watch the football
game. There are moments at these parties when I get excited about a splash play
and literally everyone else will look up from their phones and ask me, “What
happened?” At a “football party.” Where people gather to watch football.
Super Bowl 52 happened to be a really entertaining
game. It was a well played, relatively penalty free, back and forth game that
came down to the end. However, it was still overhyped. And to make things
worse, the commercials were really atrocious. Take for example, this BUDWEISER
COMMERCIAL. Now, I am not knocking their effort to
help people — that is a wonderful thing. What I am knocking is how they spent
north of 5 million dollars to pat themselves on the back for helping people
when they could have used those 5 million dollars to actually help people. The
only thing valuable to emerge from this commercial is that Budweiser has
finally admitted that their beer is water.
Then take this well thought out DODGE
RAM COMMERCIAL. And by well thought out I mean mind
numbingly stupid. Who thought using content from a Dr. Martin Luther King
Junior speech to sell a horrible truck was a good idea? If it wasn’t the person
involved in the Che Guevara Mercedes-Benz campaign, here’s what needs to happen
— the person behind the MLK commercial and the person behind the Che Guevara
idea need to sit in a cold, dark, isolated room together and slap each other in
the face until something semi-intelligent materializes.
Yes, these commercials are heinous and the Super
Bowl is a joke, but what bothers me most is that it works. Common folk will
irresponsibly spend a silly amount of money on the Super Bowl only to serve the
wealthy. If these commercials didn’t cause people to go out and buy these stupid
products, these companies wouldn’t spend 5 million dollars for a 30 second
spot. Plain and simple, it works. The Super Bowl is a cacophony wasted on the
deaf. It is such a wasted teachable moment and that is why it stings. If the
deaf could hear, they would know that what looks like a beautiful symphony is
in fact a cacophony that is so loud that we are all going deaf.
There, however, was one good commercial — check out
this GROUPON COMMERCIAL and watch a rich
white dude get a football kicked into his nuts.
