Core Post — Week 4

Like Maddie, I found it nearly impossible to approach this week’s reading without due consideration of television’s annual broadcast monolith, The Super Bowl. Very few, if any, contemporary television programs can singularly command the level of cultural and industrial clout that the big game does, much less any program’s adjacent advertising bill of fare; I didn’t even watch the game and still feel compelled to blog about it, twice! In particular, I’m intrigued by the notion that Super Bowl ads have become the primary cultural text. I’d argue that this phenomenon is more or less confirmed by the fact that “YouTube AdBlitz” exists and presents viewers with a single, nonstop playlist of all of yesterday’s ads in a fashion increasingly uncommon for YouTube… ad-free.

George Lipsitz’s article, “The Meaning of Memory” articulates a robust account of televisual socioeconomics and advertising, weaving together the narratives and contradictions surrounding pre-and-post–war consumer culture, industrial modes, governmental policies, and identities. On page 77, he writes, “television advertised individual products, but it also provided a relentless flow of information and persuasion that placed acts of consumption at the core of everyday life”. Lipsitz continues to explain Ernest Dichter’s point that encouraging consumerism in line with the capitalist ideology is a two-pronged effort. First, the program must navigate viewers towards new norms that they may otherwise balk at. This imperative forms the premises for episodes like The Goldberg’s: “The In-Laws” which sings the high praises of living above one’s means on credit. The other part of this effort consists of the advertiser’s appropriation of the show’s ethos to more directly sell products and deem the act of purchasing an ethical rite of citizenship. What, then, might be implicated when the traditional border between program and advertiser is erased?

Super Bowl spots like Audi’s “Let it Go” seem to stake their claim in that liminal space. They’ve created a story-world that conveys a sense of an American past, smoggy and full of cars, albeit colorful; as was the case after World War II, there’s a groundswell of new public opinion in these transitional years, but consumerism is now taken for granted. Per Audi, the planet’s, and Maisie Williams’s, salvation is located in green energy, and the way to achieve this ecological solution is through the hard sell of their e-tron vehicles — tacked on as text to the end of the commercial.

New modes of viewer consumption seem to have fundamentally changed the old program-advertisement dynamic. No longer do we anticipate advertisers to cleverly slide in beneath the “high moral ground” established by the program to, “[remind] viewers of the wonderful products that [they]…offer.” (101). And while commercials in the age of big-data and streaming seem less tied to a particular program than they do to the individual viewer profile, one night every year seems to excessively remind us that the chasm between program and sponsor is both widening (really, what do these commercials have to do with football?) and shrinking (a commercial like Audi’s or any other’s is visually and narratively epic, long-form, and expandable across digital media in ways that a television episode is not).