This week's installment of student blog posts for my Sports, Media, & Society course (see the overall project's description here) were rattled off during a week of heightened anticipation; the Super Bowl is this Sunday, and while the game may turn out to be legen--wait for it--dary, several groups from the class chose to focus on an element of the broadcast that will result in plenty of talk show top-10 lists, YouTube searches, and water-cooler banter--Super Bowl advertising.
As a group named STATEment explained, we don't actively avoid Super Bowl commercials like we often do other advertising: "It's ironic how commercials are normally the break in the broadcast that viewers long to fast forward, but during the Super Bowl, there is no such thing as a commercial break. The three to four minutes between the live event are filled with much anticipated advertisements that entertain viewers and serve as water cooler talk and social media hashtags for days." Drawing on AdAge research that shows a growing proportion of the Super Bowl broadcast set aside for advertising time, STATEment suggests that the value of this advertising time is enhanced by young Americans' intrigue with Super Bowl advertising. The group cites a study by ad agency Venables Bell & Partners that calls this phenomena the "Mad Men" effect, pointing out that most young adults prefer to watch the game with commercials and a quarter of those surveyed would pay a $0.99 subscription to watch the ads if necessary.
Like STATEment, The Replacements also looked at the cultural (and economic) phenomenon that is Super Bowl commercials. After pointing out the cultural capital that comes with being "in-the-know" about Super Bowl commercials, the group looked at the extraordinary sums paid by U.S. corporations for spot advertising during the Super Bowl. They raise the question: "is all of this spending on Super Bowl ads really necessary?" Approaching the answer from the position of corporate advertisers and their efforts at expansion, The Replacements cite Barry Judge, Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, whose company will be placing their first spot ads during a Super Bowl this year. Judge's comments incorporate a bit of old marketing wisdom and a bit of the new. In a fragmented media environment, the Super Bowl still offers a mass audience (point 1) where advertisers can borrow from the enormity of the event, elevating the importance of their message (point 2). The branding opportunity is immense (point 3), but the Super Bowl advertising we'll see this year will certainly incorporate more social media integration aimed at encouraging identification with those brands beyond the 30-second spot ad (point 4).
With all this emphasis on Super Bowl commercials, another group--titled Cause and Effects of Sports and the Media!--looked at the Super Bowl in relation to John Gerdy's claims about major professional and "big time" college sports events. Gerdy suggests that these events should no longer be called "sporting events:" According to Gerdy, "These events are entertainment extravaganzas, subject to all the promotional marketing gimmicks of a three ring circus." This group's assessment of Gerdy's sport versus entertainment proposal--"Maybe." While the group points out that much of the Super Bowl audience says they watch the broadcast for the ads more than the game, this group argues that for the 52 million or so folks that watched the last year's Super Bowl for the game, indeed, "there was a
game and a true sporting event . . . sports and entertainment can live in harmony - because it is profitable doesn't make it any less of a sport." (Then again, Gerdy might argue that the entertainment orientation shapes sports in important ways, as compared with playing the game "for its own sake.")
In all, the focus on Super Bowl advertising in these first three posts reminded me of some of the ideas discussed in Matt McAllister's (1999) essay "Super Bowl Advertising as Commercial Celebration." As McAllister (College of Communications, PSU) explains:
Commercials during the Super Bowl since the mid-1980s have been given special status. They often have characteristics more in line with entertainment media messages than stereotypical commerical media messages. They are hyped by pre-release advertisments or public relations-influenced news stories, just like movies. They feature socially and culturally prominent people, including politicians (just like news stories), new and old celebrities (just like movies), and sports personalities (just like the Super Bowl). They are much more expensive to produce, per second, than virtually any other form of television, and are not shy about trumpeting their expense. They assume a foundation of knowledge about their own social status among viewers. They are reviewed the next day with the same criteria as the newest Hollywood blockbuster (p. 421)
These first three groups' interest in Super Bowl advertising reflect, perhaps, how U.S. celebration of commercial culture has become even more punctuated over the past decade (or, at least, the awareness of this celebration).
A fourth group--with the self-explanatory name COMM 412 Group Blog--looked at the goliath that is the "Worldwide Leader in Sports"--ESPN. The group raises the question: "how big is too big?" They provide some stunning statistics on the expanse of the dominant sports media brand, including Barron Magazine's analysis that, "ESPN is worth over 40 percent of Disney's entire net worth." The group suggests that greater competition from the likes of Versus might only lead to further ESPN expansion, and that more regional and local approaches are being equally explored by the "Worldwide Leader." The group argues that eventual competitors--ideally, in their view, smaller ESPNs--would "need to be creative, innovative and offer the audience an aspect of sport that ESPN doesn't, starting and growing from there."
Aside from noting the size of ESPN, its tendency to try to "turn over every rock and then some," and its "irrelevant chatter," this group runs into a problem that I think critical analysis of sports media so often runs into: If we're going to critique the size or practices of a sports media outlet, we're often hit with the following rebuttal--"What's the big deal... lighten up... it's just sports." To a certain degree, this rebuttal has some substance; a critical perspective on "hard" news coverage, representations of women in advertising, or violent video games seems to find more traction when we're looking at the media's influence on society and culture than does critical analysis of sports coverage (recognizing that critique is not inherently negative, as the connotation might suggest). This is why critical analysis of sports and media requires sharp perspectives (which we're ideally developing in this class) for understanding the often subtle and seemingly natural ways that sports content both reflects and shapes U.S. culture. This group is on the right track in questioning the impact of watching sports "through ESPN-tinted sunglasses," and I hope that, by the end of the semester, they'll be able to bolster this argument with a more developed normative lens on the sports-society relationship: What kind of relationship do we want to see? And how does ESPN's cultural fare stack up against that vision?
Another group looked at the ascendancy of Green Bay Packers' quarterback Aaron Rodgers and his opportunity to shake "The Next Brett Favre" tag that he entered the league with. A final group reflected on an On the Media segment concerning the ethics of reporting on steroids in baseball. The group argues that writers should "lay off players and stop destroying their reputation publicly."
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