Are You Ready for Some Super Bowl Commercials?

Are You Ready for Some Super Bowl Commercials? And Football, Too.

Well Studio 602ers, it’s almost that time once more.

Time to bust out your game face, time to gather round the sofa, time to consume your weight in fried mozzarella sticks and buffalo wings and time to cheer on players at the top of their game as they throw the best that they’ve got at their equally-matched foes.

Oh, and apparently there will be a football game at some point as well.

I’m not a big football person, but like many, I am a fan of Super Bowl commercials. The challenge of presenting a memorable, compelling narrative in chunks of thirty to sixty seconds is daunting enough, but when you add in 111 million viewers (the total US viewership alone in 2011), the task is dang near herculean.

And while any artist would panic at the thought of their work being viewed and criticized by over one hundred million people, the creative types behind Super Bowl advertisements face another hurdle: cost. While the perils of finance are familiar to all artists, thirty-second advertising slots for the 2012 Super Bowl sold for up to $3.5 million dollars a chunk.

I don’t even have a horse in this race, and I am hyperventilating at the thought.

Some might scoff at the above assertion that the admeisters behind the Super Bowl advertisements are artists, but I stick by that appellation. The tension between art and commerce is always present, and when we ask if commerce is art, it becomes even more difficult to divine. You’ll have one group up in arms at the mere thought that something that blatantly sells a product could ever be art, while others will roll their eyes and point to all of those vintage travel and liquor posters that people hang in their houses as artwork. Then it comes down to what you consider “art,” and after that it gets messy, especially if you are knee-deep in Super Bowl.

For my money, advertising can be art, and vice-versa. I’m especially drawn to art that creates an experience or conveys a narrative beyond the surface, and I’m drawn to the same thing in advertising. Take last year’s break-out ad for Volkswagon, in which a little boy in a Darth Vader mask stomps through his house, attempting to use “The Force” to move household objects. He finally succeeds in using his powers to start the family Volkswagon, with a little help from dad and the fancy automatic controller doo-hickey (highly technical term, that).

High art? No. But it told a compelling narrative with an impact that was far more universal than selling any particular car or product. We all were kids once, and remember how powerless that felt at times. Darth Vader may have given us nightmares, but he was big, strong, and probably didn’t have a bed time, therefore a little part of us wanted to be him. For a second, we were that little kid again, and when he gained phenomenal cosmic powers, so did we. And it was pretty cool.

What would a Blackwing Super Bowl advertisement look like? I’d like to think it would pay homage to the legends who came before, perhaps incorporating the accomplishments of the Blackwing artists we’ve highlighted previously. How it ends, of course, would be up to you and the next generation of legends.

Give us your pitch for a Blackwing Super Bowl ad in the comments below! And be sure to check back Monday for our round-up of our favorite Super Bowl ads of 2012.

Photo credit Stock.Xchg/Vacanjay