Super Bowl Commercials Push New Message On Biggest Stage
While the New England Patriots made the Super Bowl must watch TV as they came back from a 25-point deficit, the usual reason for why people tuned in took a different tactic.
Commercials have always been the one thing to bring Americans together during the biggest sporting event of the year and this year was no different. Usually, that’s the topic of conversation the next day—which commercials were funny, which ones weren’t. However, with the recent changes, it seems that companies decided to by and large do a different tactic where they had political messages to present the Super Bowl audience.
There were a few major commercials that stood out when it came to political messages. The first is the Budweiser commercial labeled “Born The Hard Way” which depicted Budweiser’s owner, Adolphus Busch, as an unwanted German immigrant who found his way to the land of opportunity and founded one of the biggest beer companies in the country. It was a sober moment and it definitely captured Americans in their living rooms, especially considering the current political climate with President Donald Trump’s immigration executive order.
Watch Budweiser’s “Born The Hard Way”
Another ad that had a similar if not more impactful impact was the Lumber 84 commercial. Lumber 84’s commercial was already controversial as it depicted a family trying to cross the border into America from Mexico. However, Fox execs did not let them play the full commercial as they felt it was too controversial—except audiences had to sit through that really bad Terry Bradshaw commercial. What execs did let get through ended up causing the Lumber 84 website to crash as the commercial told audiences to go see the full version online.
Watch Lumber 84 Commercial Now
“Ignoring the border wall and the conversation around immigration that’s taking place in the media and at every kitchen table in America just didn’t seem right,” Rob Shapiro, the chief client officer at Brunner, the agency that worked with 84 Lumber to come up with the ad, told the Washington Post. “If everyone else is trying to avoid controversy, isn’t that the time when brands should take a stand for what they believe in?”
While that may have been the theme of many brands to bring up what their company may believe in, there were other brands that were doing status quo commercials—which were equally intriguing and also exciting. Let’s get the big one out of the way first. Netflix dropped when the new Stranger Things season is going to start—Halloween. That means we are all going to have to watch the series multiple times until the new one comes out. As many know, Stranger Things was the cultural phenomenon that took the world by storm as one of Netflix’s biggest original series.
There were three other commercials that may have been of interest to people one being Disney’s latest Pirates of the Caribbean film and another with the latest Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Both are set to drop this summer in a movie theater near you.
While this year’s commercials happened to be interesting and at times very informative. There weren’t a lot of jokes happening this year. One wonders if this is going to be the latest trend to have brands tap into in order to get people to buy into their company’s products.
