Smokin' the Super Bowl

How did advertising become the lord's work?

This is me watching football, for real. I used to boycott the game (because it makes me make this face) but my man makes wings for the occasion so like any wise person, I follow the Buffalo sauce. I’m glad I did too because it proved to be kind of the Met Ball of Super Bowls.

As we’d all hoped, Taylor Swift raced across the earth in record time to attend her man’s game, kissed him congrats, and all the country was sated. Here’s to love, anywhere, anytime! Few folks know how to max out a photo-op like she does. After all, she filled her box (hee hee, see what I did there?) with Lana Del Rey (the best woozy chanteuse), Ice Spice (responsible for my fave bar: “You think you’re the shit/You’re not even the fart”) and Blake Lively, who knows how to turn a sports event into a fash MO-MENT by augmenting her low-key athleisure with a big statement necklace and even bigger hair. The closer to God, indeed!

Taylor is genius at self-promotion but nobody puts Beyoncé in a corner. In an ultimate brand-artist collab, she used her Verizon ad (in which she sent-up how far artists will go to promote themselves) to announce she was dropping new music and, in that instant, released two country music singles. BOOM!

It struck me how their approach to the promo juggernaut that is the Super Bowl so aptly reflected how they each approach their music. Taylor is a talent we can rely on to do what is pretty, palatable, and universally celebrated. Beyoncé is an artist who will challenge herself to master a genre diametrically opposed to her last work. I mean, I despise country music and I actually like “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages” because a) the melodies, lyrics, and vocals don’t hurt my ears and b) the arrangements and production values redesign the genre as her own. This country album will be the second in a series of three that reclaims music created by Black people, with deep roots in Southern plantations. There’s a thesis to her body of work.

What is a Super Bowl without the spectacle of star-studded zillion-dollar ad spends? I was in advertising in a past life, so I live! There were a lot of compelling spots but one I can’t unsee is the DUNKINGS Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez spot with best supporting character, Matt Damon. In just 60 or 90 seconds, Ben proved to the world just how much he loves that woman, so let’s raise a cruller to the dude. The Dawnie/TAWM BRADEE/Fat Joe/Jack Hahhhhlow of it all aside, I always find it comforting when I hear an actual Boston accent say “She came to my weurk” because it’s as authentic as it gets.

On a more serious, note, I don’t know which of these new product offerings scares me more: the personal AI app, Copilot or the Wahlberg-endorsed Christianity app, Hallow.

Imagine finding Jesus through a Super Bowl ad: I lost my shirt but I found Jesus!

These ads beg the inevitable existential question: Have we desensitized and compartmentalized so much, having witnessed mass death due to the pandemic, our shitty lax gun laws, and the current genocides that we feel we need to turn to apps to do our spiritual and actual work for us?

What does this say about how lost we are, and how much we want to be told what to do? Are we now so afraid to say or do with wrong thing—do we trust ourselves and our ability to think critically so little—that we’d rather close our eyes and hand an app the wheel without even questioning the potential repercussions?!

(WAIT: Is AI what The Police meant by Ghost In the Machine?)

As Erykah Badu says, I’m an analog girl in a digital world. Sure, I’m using a machine to communicate with you right now, but the words and beliefs are generated by me, and me alone. I fear the more we lean on machines to think and feel for us, the less we’ll be able to think and feel for ourselves. And this is how fascism happens, folks.

It’s a good thing Beyoncé and Taylor Swift have new music coming out—at least the soundtrack to our inevitable demise will be decent.

BOOM!

xo