PETA and the SuperBowl Ads

I used to love watching the SuperBowl, but not for the football. It was always about the ads. The only thing is, in the evironment of media connectivity these days, I wound up playing World of Warcraft while my laundry ran and I had the advertisements of the game playing in the background. This year, the only ad I was really fascinated by was the ad that DIDN'T run - placed by PETA.

It's weird, really, when a media event takes up more of the time with commercials than the actual game does. And on many levels, since my collegiate days when the convergence of technology and advertising revenue streams were meeting up for the first time, the ads have gone far, far downhill.

Advertising is no longer about the ideas of creatives, because showing a series of one-second Miller Lite ads seems to be more effective than placing a thirty-second spot in the middle of the show. All the shows that are out there simply don't tend to hold revenue as much as they used to.

Specifically, newspapers are the first hit by the technology change. The quality and content of many regional and national newspapers have changed for the worse as advertisers flock to online advertising more than they do print and television media. Even radio is shifting - when I can create a 24/7 media stream online as a radio station and place my voice on every single person's desktop who simply clicks on a link, the old guard of radio programming is slowly moving by the wayside.

I think I'm more concerns about the quality of the SuperBowl ads because not only did I not watch them in context (IE, for the SuperBowl) but I didn't care, and I didn't watch the ads as commercials, but as entertainment. The notorious (and still crazily wacky in the head) PETA threw out a commercial (NSFW, depending on where you work) scantily-clad women doing things with vegetables that didn't show up until 3AM on Cinemax until recently to promote veganism. The fact that PETA's ad didn't hit the airwaves didn't matter as much - their political pressure points, while sophmorically attempting to be "edgy", really don't do much for the "cute fuzzy widdle animals with faces" cause.

I'm dating a farm girl, and one of the things I still can't quite get over as a city boy is her family's attitude towards animals. I freak out whenever I see a horse-drawn carriage; she sees it as more or less a natural extension of the animal's physical purpose in our current society. I still believe in ham, bacon, and other pork products coming neatly packaged - she's raised and slaughtered chickens, pigs, cows, and sheep, including cute little baby lambs (and turkeys). I do my hunter-gathering at Safeway.com or Amazon's Fresh when I'm feeling particularly lazy, she still digs out packages of white butcher paper meat from the freezer on her parents' farm. And yet I am POSITIVE that the animals on her family's farm live healthy, happy lives that are fulfilling and rich - as far as any cow or pig's life can be without dying of old age.

And while PETA's political argument is, and continues to be, "You are a bad bad man for munching on a hamburger and we have sexy chicks dancing around vegetables who WON'T if you keep eating those baby back ribs", the shock treatment of the audience is fading away. Had NBC broadcast the ad, I doubt it would have generated much more than a prurient salivation of most of the male audience. It's not because PETA didn't hire sexy girls to gyrate on pumpkins - it's because sexy girls gyrating on pumpkins doesn't have as effective a selling point any longer in the massive market of advertising and information.

The disassociation of the smaller, core group of advertisers using the SuperBowl as a realm to play the best work of elite teams for both entertainment and the satisfaction of their clients is something that just bothers me for some reason. It's the same reason I like reading articles by journalists based in Seattle at the Post-Intelligencer and don't like the Seattle Times' heavy reliance on Reuters and the AP for content.

I get the feeling that with the advancement of advertising avenues, the SuperBowl's relevancy and the subsequent viewing options are going to reduce dramatically. When you need to put together SEO options, AdSense ads, print, radio, television, Internet Video and meme-style advertising, the quality of your presentation drops dramatically. Hell, I'd rather post a picture of a movie from 1921 in my apartment than the most artistically detailed computer-generated CGI - regardless of how much craft the CGI takes simply because the artistry of the original is far more real than the mass-generation of items.

I also find it difficult to believe that with the push towards the SuperBowls ads and the shock value PETA went for with their ad that we're not going to find an improvement in the entertainment of the ads any more. They're just not there. And Miller's Ad campaign of one-second commercial spots simply isn't going to be a one-off - I have a strong feeling that such ads will continue on both cable and network television.

Anyway. I keep thinking it's entirely possible that in 2010, the SuperBowl may be a webcast-only event, with advertisers using targeted ads, and the experience of each user customized for tailor-made ads. Cheaper, and less of a show. But then again, maybe that's what we're looking for in our media these days. One day or another, we might just return to straight text news.