 Several Random Things I Learned Before Super Bowl Halftime
This is the time of year when young men’s minds turn to thoughts of ranting about the the commercials in the Big Game! Not this year. Since this year’s event was so much different by being presented in a stadium filled with super-fan super spreaders consorting with photo cutouts of actual human beings who stayed home and enjoyed the televised soundtrack of crowd noise from Big Games past, we’re going to be different about this year’s screed on commercials. Be prepared. You might decide that you want to quit your job and become a Canadian rapper. Or quit your job as a Canadian rapper and do something else. Then, you won’t have to compete with Drake or The Weeknd, both of whom were very much in evidence Sunday, and are too big for you to ever compete with them. (If you are one of our many friends north of the border who subscribes to the screed, you might wish to become an American rapper who kicks ass and takes names. More on that in a moment.) Here now, a short list of the things I learned before halftime of last Sunday’s game… Logitech makes it clear everybody is a creator. And even if they’re not, they are anyway. Buy more tools and mistake them for talent! Ridley Scott has produced a documentary for YouTube. It is based on the lowest of the low-budget footage possible: cell phone videos from around the world! By the way, Mr. Scott is the man who created the most famous Super Bowl commercial ever, and the one that started the mega-commercial madness: Apple Computer’s 1984. How’s that for irony? CBS is letting us know: The Equalizer is back! Originally an old, rich white guy who's a retired covert ops specialist with a hint of James Bond, he’s returned to network TV as an American rapper, actor, producer and talk show host named Queen Latifah, kicking ass and taking names! Will Ferrell is still ridiculous. On purpose, of course. And he can get away with saying "Damn it!” in a national TV commercial. Raymond James Stadium only looks like an ultra-super-spreader event. I figured that out between commercials. More cutouts. Less behind-a-mask, mouth-breathing madness. Except for the wild cheering and/or booing during the respectful moment of silence for the 400,000 COVID dead. Way to go, America! Thank you and goodnight! The Pringles Super Stack is now a huge deal. In fact, judging from the message, it is far more important than human life or even just doing your job with a modicum of competence. Do Canadian rappers and/or Queen Latifah partake in this processed potato madness? Mountain Dew is now pink. I missed the reason why. Does it have anything to do with supporting breast cancer awareness? Asking for a friend. Oops. Google just informed me that the new pink Mountain Dew product is called “Major Melon.” Unintentional bad joke. Apologies. Using the Indeed app means your job search now comes with a caterwauling soundtrack. Also, the job search in 2021 can mean just rolling over in bed and looking at your phone. Probably can be done from bed with a modicum of competence while Pringles Super Stacking. CAUTION: crumbs in the sheets. State Farm is confusing. Canadian rapper Drake is now inexplicably doubling for the inexplicably new Jake from State Farm. And is being a Canadian rapper in the US now a growth industry? Plummeting fruit causing a guy to ride his bike into a pile of trash bins? Always funny. So is a guy’s head suddenly jammed inside a plummeting bees nest. Slapstick never goes out of style! Another new growth industry: developing dairy-free beverages by squeezing plants and calling it “Milk.” Even though it is not milk. Milk comes from a female mammal or a coconut. SIDEBAR: Does oat “milk” pair well with the Pringles stack? And can Queen Latifah kick its ass? Will Jake, Drake and Will Ferrell just stand by and watch while collecting their SAG residuals? So many questions. Salvador Dali would be impressed by Toyota’s ad agency. Toyota’s ad agency suggested their client make a disturbingly surreal TV commercial and got away with it. (It’s loveable much in the way one loves having woken from a bad dream. Most people were probably freaked out by it. WWRD: What Would Ridley Scott Do?) And speaking of surreal… Turbo Tax and their invasion of the creeping desks makes me scared of them. Salvador Dali would not be impressed. It feels like an episode of The Twilight Zone gone wrong. Yay, Vroom! At almost halfway through the game, Vroom is the first advertiser to both a) get a laugh and b) clearly convey the benefit of their product. SIDEBAR: 12 hours later, I couldn’t tell you who Vroom is or why I felt that way. The advertising lesson here? Most of the time, one insertion does not work without a powerful offer. Most times, repetition and frequency are everything. And finally, no Budweiser commercial clearly does not mean no advertising for other Anheuser Busch products—including, covertly, Budweiser. There were many, many commercials for AB InBev products, including one for many, many of them that tells you it’s not about the beer. Budweiser logos were hidden about like Easter eggs. No actual advertising for actual Budweiser was a canny PR move as well as a useful non-profit investment. Among other things, Budweiser is putting those millions into the Ad Council’s COVID Collaborative efforts at vaccine awareness. And at halftime, I stopped trying to pay attention to the commercials. That’s because I was at a small, COVID-bubble party where nobody cared about the advertising. Every time CBS went to a break, my mask-free friends just began talking about other things. Interestingly, they all kept coming back to the question of whether Queen Latifah could really kick ass and take names. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for me, you’ll find me rolling over in bed and jamming a Pringles Super Stack in the hole while searching the Indeed app for a new job milking oatmeal… Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the bargain price of $19.95. For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!)
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 The Anti-Masker Appeal For Fun & Profit!
Like me, you might be a big, hairy, anti-masking man. I’ve been thinking things through. And I want to talk to you about a power we may be missing out on. This power can change lives, make former enemies love us, and give us the ultimate power of persuasion in getting our fellow Americans to believe we’re helping to change the world, even if we’re not. We’re talking about appealing to the Placebo Effect. You and I know the pro-maskers are falling victim to nefarious forces determined to control our brains and democracy for the sinister creep of global socialism and crappy health care. If you’ve ever read about Mary Mallon, she believed something equally nefarious was at work when she was told that she had highly contagious typhoid, and she should take herself out of circulation as a cook inside people’s homes. Typhoid Mary knew better, of course. She was no fool. She infected only 53 people, and only three of those people died. Everyone else enjoyed her mad skills at corned beef and cabbage casserole. She’s so famous as a denier, she's even got her own Wikipedia page. But let’s forget about Mary for the moment. Instead, let’s look at the power of the brain to make people feel better. The Placebo Effect is all the rage right now. You’ve certainly heard about the legendary sugar pill used in Big Pharma medical studies. (Just by the way, Big Pharma does not rule the world, despite what highly reliable sources are telling you on highly reliable social media channels in between adorable videos of kittens with sidearms and photos of Bernie wearing mittens made of recycled plastic bottles.) It turns out that merely participating in a pharmaceutical study, being told what the study drug should do, then being given a sugar pill is potent. It can fool your brain into creating the intended effect of the actual drug. This is placebo in action. Placebo Effect switches on the brain’s neurotransmitters, bringing good feelings about the sugar pill, and lulls the subject into the poetic complacency of actual wellness. This sugar pill makes your migraine melt away! Seriously. This is actual, medical science stuff. People are stupid enough to be fooled into believing a sugar pill is effective medicine and they feel better. That’s the classic situation. There’s a new and exciting placebo for big, hairy fat people like me. You’re not going to believe this one. Ready? Think yourself thin! A new study shows that people who merely imagine themselves exercising are actually in better shape than people who don’t. Have you wanted a Peleton, but the bike is on backorder or otherwise too close to the cost of three mortgage payments for you to feel good about buying it instead of just going running and doing pushups or riding that actual bike that’s already in the garage? Forget about it! Now, I can just think about my husband giving me a Peleton, and I, too, can become an object of interwebs scorn and derision for welcoming inferred fat shaming from my spouse AND be better toned in the process! Placebo ho! Actual exercise be gone! Anyway, despite centuries worth of supposed evidence both clinical and anecdotal, going as far back as the rollicking good times of The Black Plague, we all know the mask is a pointless exercise in preventing the transmission of a potentially deadly disease. The surgeon who cuts us open is wearing that surgical mask only as malpractice suit prevention because in court you can’t say with 100% assuredness the guy on the stand is the same guy who had the scalpel. Kill all the lawyers! But I digress. Let’s forget that. Let’s go placebo! Think of the potent national thought storm that would erupt from sea to shining sea if everyone came together and became unified under the same N95 mask. People’s neurotransmitters would start going crazy! Everyone’s brains would light up and say, “Hell, yeah! We can kick this COVID crap to the curb!” All those at-risk people who are afraid to leave the house would suddenly feel less at-risk--as if maybe there’s some actual hope. Imagine the domino effect! The entire nation could fool itself into eliminating a disease. All those feel-good endorphins and all that dopamine would get busy inside everyone’s system and make stuff happen. And then, the United States would be like weeny little New Zealand, where months ago, millions of people fooled themselves into believing this nonsense and are now running around in shopping malls and hanging out in bars and breathing in each other’s faces like there’s no tomorrow. All that dopamine and all those endorphins go rushing around in our heads and create better moods and more positive emotional reactions and (ready for this?) enhanced self-awareness. Think how thoughtful you might become! Like me, you could win friends and influence people and might even have career potential for the highly profitable diplomatic corps. Because when we start thinking tactically, like “Oh, maybe maskless me has been scaring that old fat man with diabetes and that mother who just went through chemo. I don’t want them thinking I’m Typhoid Mary, even though Mary never wore a headdress like this one made of racoon pelts and buffalo horns,” everyone feels better about things. (I’m now hanging my headdress over the fireplace.) Think about how this impacts the Super Bowl. If everyone gets on the Placebo Effect bandwagon by wearing a mask, Budweiser could turn around and take that five and a half million bucks they’re channeling into COVID-awareness advertising and put it back into a Super Bowl commercial where it belongs. Then, big, hairy anti-masking men like me can get all blubbery over a 30-second story about Clydesdale horses once again making the world safe for puppies and democracy. Placebos. Emotions. Brain chemicals. Moods. Cooperation. Happiness. Happy cooperation has happened before. Americans used cooperation to make this nation great enough to get through World War II. It can work again on this new war. Or I’m not an American. Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the bargain price of $19.95. For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!) |
AuthorBlaine Parker is prone to ranting about any and all things related to brand. In many ways, he is a professional curmudgeon. While there is no known vaccine for this, the condition is also not contagious. Unless you choose it to be so. Archives
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