The Best Part of the Game
Tomorrow is the Super Bowl. Most people would agree that the Super Bowl is the biggest sporting event of the year in the U.S. It’s probably the most highly rated TV program all year, as a result. Because of this, commercials are more expensive during the Super Bowl than during any other time slot all year. So if this is such a big game, why is it that so few people care about the game?
Let’s use myself as an example: I could care less about the game. I don’t like either team; my favorite team has already been eliminated in a similar way to the way they were eliminated for three years in a row now – close but no cigar. I also think it will be a boring game, as neither team is particularly flashy or even has any playmakers. So why would I watch? For the commercials.
I’ll watch for the same reason that everyone else who doesn’t care about the game (which is most people) will watch. Because they have such an enormous captive audience, the advertising firms go all out for the Super Bowl, but I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this – everybody knows that the Super Bowl is all about the commercials. On a recent poll I saw the other day on the elevator, over 50% of those who responded said that the best part of the game wasn’t the game at all, but the commercials.
If you think about it, that’s kinda strange for a couple of reasons. First, people generally hate commercials. Commercials are those annoying windows that pop up when you go to some websites. Commercials are what make 1 hour of football last 3 ½ hours. Commercials are probably one of the major inspirations of the remote control – an easy way to change the channel to find something better. Commercials are the filler, not the entertainment.
In fact, the entertainment is the TV shows or movies. The TV shows are the main attraction, not the commercials. No one watching a TV show looks forward to when it goes to commercial. If people loved commercials, then they would also have them every so often during a movie you’d see in the theater. But, as we all know, one of the nice things about seeing a movie in the theater (or on a DVD for that matter) is that there aren’t any commercials. Indeed, one of the attractions to TIVO is that you can get rid of the commercials!
With all of this in mind, why the heck is it that during the Super Bowl people look forward to the commercials? Because they’re more entertaining than the average commercials. As it turns out, there are some non-Super Bowl commercials that are, indeed, entertaining, but they’re sporadic at best. During the Super Bowl, however, the majority of commercials are intended to be entertaining. This probably has to do with the fact that I mentioned before – that the audience is so large and captivated. As a result, firms don’t mind spending a little extra money developing more entertaining commercials since they know that these commercials will have great exposure.
So we’ve made some progress. We’ve figured out why people enjoy the commercials during the Super Bowl: they’re more entertaining than usual. Somehow, I doubt that this is a particularly surprising find. But this find is interesting because it begs a question. If commercials can, in fact, be entertaining, then why are they just filler? Why don’t they have commercials being the feature? Why not just have two-hour long commercials with occasional 2-3 minute segments from some TV show? Why not reverse the common relationship between shows and commercials?
I think it’s because commercials are entertaining, but not on a deep enough level to make them entertaining enough to be the main event. The reason for this is twofold. First, the end of a commercial is not to entertain; it is to sell a product. As a result, the function of a commercial would not be well served if it was entertaining foremost, and its effectiveness at selling a product was an afterthought. As a result, a commercial cannot possibly have the kind of entertainment value a movie or even a sitcom might have. Its very nature prevents it.
The second part of this is the time constraint. There’s only so much you can do in 90 seconds, which is probably considered a very long commercial. Sure, if you did the whole 2-hour long commercial idea, then that might avoid this problem. But who is going to sit and watch a 2-hour program trying to sell a product. Okay, I know, I just explained what an infomercial is. I guess there are, in fact, people that watch these. God help them. But these infomercials are hardly in Nielsen’s Top 10.
At any rate, that’s my analysis. I think that commercials can be entertaining, but they can’t be the feature because they’re very nature prevents it. So why are things different for the Super Bowl? I don’t think they are. I think it’s just that it happens to be the one time per year that commercials tend to be above average. Since they’re above average, people think that they might find a few that are quite entertaining. And since it’s a Sunday night anyway, when there isn’t much else to do, and there will be big time football fans who they are friends with that will be throwing parties for the Super Bowl anyway, they might as well hang out and enjoy the above average commercials. At least, that’s all I can figure, and exactly what I plan on doing.