Super Bowl Ads 2009 Were Dull Without PETA, and That's Good

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

It seems like people agree on two things about the Super Bowl this year: The game was super, but the ads were not.

Good.

For a while now, I've found the buildup to the Super Bowl ads to be, well, kind of creepy. I mean ... they're ads. This isn't art. It isn't entertainment. They're vehicles designed to induce you to burn your money on their product. And yet I know of people who host Super Bowl parties where the guests chatter away during the game, but angrily shush each other if someone speaks during the commercials. Granted, some spots become cultural touchstones. But those spots earn it—we don't just watch or discuss them because they are on. If ad makers are clever enough to produce a spot that gets talked about (or as in the case of PETA, produce an ad that gets talked about without even being aired—but would certainly have spiced things up), then more power to them. But getting to the place where we line up to consume ads for the sake of consuming ads, where the fact that they air on Super Sunday makes them shows unto themselves ... Like I said, it's really kind of creepy and weird. So hopefully a dull Super Bowl ad "season" will start to reverse that trend and we can be less like the audience in, ahem, that 1984 Mac ad.

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