As Super Bowl XLIII looms, my friends and I are anticipating the winners and losers. Not the football players, of course. What really matters during the Super Bowl is the ads: corporate America’s annual attempt to have the most innovative, funniest, most aah-inspiring spot during the world’s most highly viewed hours of broadcasting.
Even after a year of a seemingly bottomless stock prices, $4-a-gallon gas, bailout after bailout, falling home values and rising unemployment, advertisers are shelling out a record-setting $3 million for 30 seconds of airtime (and that doesn’t include production costs, which can run $1 million apiece). Why? Because the Super Bowl audience continues to grow, year after year, or so say the Nielsen TV ratings people. Last year, the Super Bowl was broadcast into 48.7 million homes, where 97.4 million people watched it.
In years past, Super Bowl commercial breaks were like movie premieres; if you wanted to talk about the show the next day, you had to watch the ads during the game. Now, I can easily see the ads online, allowing me to use a commercial break the way that nature intended, to grab a fresh beer and load up on crab dip. I don’t need to stay glued to the set to see the best ads. But still, advertisers are betting that I will.
So I wonder, does the Super Bowl audience still justify an advertiser’s investment? Share your thoughts, and stay tuned for next week’s post-game wrap-up.
Monday morning, as I was eating some snack crackers, three people asked me if they contained peanut butter. They didn’t; they were the cheese-on-cheese variety. But I am a fan of peanut butter crackers. I eat them regularly, and I’m not about to stop because the media have started shouting, “Peanut butter may kill you! News at 11.”
According to the CDC, approximately 40,000 cases of salmonella are reported in the U.S. every year. And because many milder cases are not diagnosed or reported, the actual number may be 30 or more times higher. That’s as many as 1.2 million cases, or about 100,000 per month.
As of January 19, the CDC reported peanut butter salmonella had likely poisoned 475 people and contributed to six deaths.
So the media is whipping the public into a panicked frenzy because peanut butter may be linked to somewhere between .04 and 1 percent of salmonella cases.
This is how the media now works. Take a small issue, sensationalize it and then run it into the ground. “Is your child’s teddy bear a murder weapon? Tune in tonight. Do you know the deadly secret your hamster is hiding? News at 11.”
I’m sick of hearing the hyped versions of what are actually minor stories. But even more than that, I’m tired of people who take this information as gospel, forgetting to investigate a little further or think for themselves.
What’s your position, on peanut butter and/or the media’s scare tactics?
In a twisted way, I admire Bernard Madoff. Not, of course, because he (allegedly) cheated people out of $50 billion (including, according to news reports, his own family members and the Elie Weisel Foundation for Humanity). But because, if all the revelations prove true, Madoff followed the old card-sharp mantra, “Go big or stay home.” I’ve always respected chutzpah.
I’ve never understood why criminals go to all the trouble of counterfeiting U.S. currency only to churn out 10-dollar bills to spend at Taco Bell. Why not print hundreds, then jet off to Brazil for a steak? Or the guys who use a truck to steal a pop machine, getting a few hundred bucks in change and a week’s worth of diet sodas. Why not boost a freshly stocked ATM? Madoff may be a thief, but he’s sure not a petty one.
I’m not saying we should all embark on crime sprees. But I am saying that criminals, like people, often think too small. And in these challenging times, we can’t afford petty thinking. We need big thinkers—people like Madoff, only without the criminal wrongdoing.
The architect Daniel Burnham, one of the people charged with rebuilding an entire city after the Chicago Fire of 1871, said, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
Who’s stirring your blood these days?
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