Deflated

How advertisers blew the Super Bowl

Andrew Essex
4 min readFeb 4, 2019
Photo: Patrick Smith/Getty

The Rams failed to score a single touchdown in Super Bowl LIII. They’ll live to play another day. Imagine being one of 20 massive brands that, under the scrutiny of some 98 million eyeballs, flushed away $5 million each for 30 seconds of unmemorable advertising. Forget about blown calls. What’s the penalty for $100 million squandered on blown Super Bowl spots?

Having toiled as an ad guy for years, I say farewell to yet another Super Bowl with the usual mixture of relief, embarrassment, and revulsion. Does this circus really still need to exist? Was that bowl really super? Not so much. Let’s face it: The game, if not NFL football itself, has become the world’s biggest anachronism, a lumbering anomaly stuck in amber, increasingly outmoded in a newly woke world. Everywhere else, where content is always available on demand in shorter and shorter commercial-free serving sizes, the Super Bowl is perhaps the only platform left in media in which advertising is, theoretically at least, a feature, not a bug. It’s a three-hour spectacle larded with Madison Avenue marbling like a force-fed goose. For advertisers, a Super Bowl spot used to be an opportunity to compete for national relevance, a chance to win the water-cooler championship and see their products restored to the center of the national conversation. These days, unfortunately, the following…

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