Super Bowl XXXV's media hype: Enough is enough

Stop thinking about all those wonderful, clever Super Bowl XXXV commercials for a moment and pay attention. This is for your own benefit.\nIf you plopped down with your family and friends Sunday evening for the NFL's championship game, did you ever, for even the slightest amount of time, consider the possibility of not watching the Super Bowl? No, of course not.\nThat's because the Super Bowl is, like, a national holiday, right? Wrong.\n"Super Sunday" is a phony holiday, even phonier than "Sweetest Day." It's a holiday created and sustained in our collective consciousness by the news media and their partners in crime, the advertising and marketing industries. Every year, it becomes less about football and more about selling beer, potato chips, dot-com services and more. And we sit and stare, idly, as the "clever," "cute" and "creative" advertisements flicker across the screen. \nOnly during the Super Bowl do we get up to use the restroom or go to the refrigerator while the game is on so we won't miss any commercials. It's painful to admit, but there's nothing clever, cute or creative about being bought and sold as products. That's right. CBS sold the prospect of your eyeballs viewing its presentation of Super Bowl XXXV to Anheuser-Busch, PepsiCo, Frito-Lay, E-Trade and all the other corporations, who shelled out $2 million for each 30-second spot of advertising. \nThe funny thing is that CBS' competition -- and the news media as a whole -- didn't do a whole heck of a lot to discourage people from watching the Super Bowl. \nTo its credit, the IDS kept the Super Bowl hype at a reasonable level. The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, published seven Super Bowl-related stories in its Friday edition alone. Granted, the majority of these were, in keeping with the Journal's tradition, written from a business and economics perspective, but this only perpetuates the problems associated with the game's commercial aspects. \nThe stories in the Journal hyped the hype and not the game itself. They went into great detail about the lucrative sums of money being spent by advertisers, but one had to turn to the back page of the last section to find an article written about the game itself, which team would win it and why it would win. The totality of the Journal's coverage might lead one to believe the commercials are more important than the game.\nMaybe this is so. Many people probably feel that way about the Super Bowl. Perhaps they do view it as a holiday, as a celebration of capitalism or something like that. It doesn't matter who wins and loses, it's about what advertising firm comes up with the best product pitch, right? \nBut hyping the hype? Enough is enough. The media's promotion of Super Bowl commercials instead of the game itself must stop. Case in point: "The Super Bowl's Greatest Commercials," which aired Saturday on CBS. This program's content consisted of, according to CBS.com, "the most anticipated, popular and fun television commercials ever produced." This program was, of course, interrupted every so often by commercial breaks of its own, each of which probably brought in a hefty sum of money for CBS. Seems a little incestuous, don't you think? \nIt's one thing to tell us we should watch this football game; it's another, very nefarious thing to tell us we should watch this football game because of the wonderful, innovative and entertaining commercials that will appear during the broadcast.\nWe shouldn't like being bought by advertisers and sold by television networks. We shouldn't want to be bought and sold. Some of us do, and maybe that's acceptable if and only if we know what's really going on; that we aren't individuals, aren't New York Giants fans or Baltimore Ravens fans, aren't anything except consumers, an audience, a demographic, a cohort, a market, an aggregate, an age group, a socioeconomic class, a stratum and, ultimately, a pair of eyeballs and an outstretched hand clutching a credit card or a wad of cash.\nWhile I was writing this column during the weekend, the outcome of Super Bowl XXXV had yet to be decided. The ombudsman hadn't even decided if he was going to watch. (Full disclosure: The ombudsman definitely would have watched if the Miami Dolphins had played … but that's another story.) \nFor those of you who did watch the big game, please do yourselves a favor and think about those advertisements you saw with a healthy dose of skepticism. Watching commercials for entertainment or information is like asking a used car dealer for an academic lecture -- you're probably not going to get the whole truth, and you might end up buying something you don't really want or need.