Ben Adams, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather talk Super Bowl LI commercials and halftime show, breaking down two distinct sets of marketing messages. They can’t both be right… can they?
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Your Panel
Further Reading
- “Super Bowl Commercials Feature Political Undertones and Celebrities”
- “Lady Gaga’s Halftime Show Drones Have a Bright Future”
- Robot Quadrotors Perform James Bond Theme
The exit polls.
Then the first Florida returns.
This all feels very familiar.— Jody Avirgan (@jodyavirgan) February 6, 2017
I did go online and watch the full five minute edit of 84 Lumber commercial with the Trump Wall and the little girl’s American flag of scraps.
Both this commercial and the Budweiser origin story were tales I would watch a feature length version of. They leave a lot of interesting plot points on the table.
The Busch saga itself would be worthy of a 1970s era multi-generational miniseries saga as successive Busches were rather eccentric sometimes bordering on evil overlords.
And that is before even going into the whole intellectual property kerfuffle over the trademark of ‘Budweiser’ which is held by an entirely different company in the Czech Republic.
Lexus post-apocalypse derby commercial?
Well, actually, it was Audi. My mistake.
I actually read the Busch ad (which you guys placed in a more conservative, white guy in the woods with a bald eagle, in opposition to the Budweiser immigration ad) as being more of a critical comment on nostalgia (and the notion of making things great again). The setup was Busch, it exactly the awesome way you remember it, down to the sound of opening the can. Except for when you crack it open, the sound is actually obnoxious, vulgar, and awkward- not at all “how you remember it”. So I read Busch as being on the same side as Budweiser. Or maybe they are different (but adjacent) sides of a 20 sided die, rather than opposite sides of a coin.
That’s a much deeper reading than I had. I just thought they were going for comedic exaggeration about the freshness of their beer. Overall, it didn’t really seem political except for in its appreciation for nature.