Superbowl Commercials

When Buffy was on, my cousin would Fedex it to me. I couldn't wait the three months for it to come to English tv. Heck, I couldn't wait a week for it to be posted. The commercials were fantastic - for wild mobile phones and odd Mitsubishi model cars and phone cards and make up. You could tell who media buyers thought was watching it.

The Super Bowl game on Sunday had over 90 million people watching - that's just on tv in the States. I know people who went down to Leicester Square and of course the Sports Bar and I'm sure that happened all over Europe and the world. But the grand American ritual is to get together with big gangs of people and watch it on a big screen in someone's home.

We didn't have that ritual when I was growing up. Many's the time my dad would be watching it on his own. I'd come in to see what was up, he'd switch it off and we'd play cards instead.

Watching the commercials has become part of the ritual these last ten years or so. Friends who make tv commercials work hard right through the Christmas period as the budgets for those spots are pretty impressive.

The Superbowl as a venue for impactful, brand building commercials started in 1984. MT Rainey, an attractive and clever English girl, was working as an Account Planner in the States. She learned about this once a year competition and it got her thinking. The 1984 Apple commercial, shown as an "event" during the Superbowl that year, was her idea. I haven't had a drink with her in years but she's quite low key for someone who has effected American culture so significantly.

All the commercials shown during the Superbowl are available to watch here. I'll warn you though, opinions run the gamut from "suck" to "boring". This doesn't bode well for your viewing pleasure.