Omnipresent Advertising is Bowling Us Over

[Gary Ruskin]

Commercial Alert 		January 28, 2001

Following is an article in today's Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

http://www.star-telegram.com/news/doc/1047/1:VIEWPOINT1/1:VIEWPOINT10128101.html

Omnipresent Advertising is Bowling Us Over 
by Gary Ruskin 

Sometimes events become so emblematic of a culture that we don't notice
because we are so thoroughly steeped in it. That's how it is with the
Super Bowl and the college bowl games. They've become such a regular
part of our lives that we no longer consider what they say about us. 

The Super Bowl started out pretty small. It was short on hype and
fanfare. The first one was played in 1967, between the Green Bay Packers
and the Kansas City Chiefs. There wasn't even a sellout crowd; about
40,000 seats were empty in the Los Angeles Coliseum that day.

Still, two networks paid $1 million each for rights to broadcast the
game, and the take was about $750,000 in ticket fees. That's small
potatoes. Back then it was the richest team sports event in American
history.

Times have changed, and so have we. The Super Bowl has ended up as a
kind of national Rorschach test for our culture.

Today, about 130 million Americans will watch the game between the
Giants and the Ravens. But now the game itself isn't much more than a
backdrop for the ads.

The real blitz is the marketing blitz. As Monster.com CEO Jeff Taylor
says, on Super Bowl Sunday, the "advertising is the program."

The sheer dollar amounts are staggering. A single 30-second ad costs
millions to produce and about $2.2 million to air during the game.

Some companies will spend a fortune. Anheuser-Busch bought eight ads
during the game; Pepsi bought six. CBS will pocket $150 million from ad
fees, with another $50 million going to network affiliates.

The marketing has gone so far that parts of the Super Bowl have been
sold off and renamed: there's the Charles Schwab Corp. pre-kickoff hype,
an E-Trade halftime show and the Pontiac postgame cooldown.

The game will feature so many ads that even advertisers are complaining.
"The Super Bowl advertising bonanza has gotten very crowded and
cluttered," said Coca-Cola spokeswoman Susan McDermott.

And, of course, it will be played in a corporate-named arena: the
Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla. Raymond James Financial Services
Inc. bought the right to name the stadium for $55 million.

Pro sports is awash in money. Funny thing is, for all the money, the
game itself is no better. No more drama than Super Bowl III, when Joe
Namath promised a victory for the New York Jets and carried off the
upset over the Baltimore Colts, 16-7.

Many would say the game is worse. It's played by squads of overpaid
athletes, bulked up to inhuman proportions, playing a game planned like
a corporate marketing campaign but without spontaneity and joy.

Much of this is true for college bowl games, too. They used to be truly
amateur events, all about the meaning of sport. But it's all
commercialized now. So we sit through games called the Micronpc.com
Bowl, FedEx Orange Bowl, Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, and my own favorite,
the Poulan Weed Eater Bowl.

Money and advertising have swallowed college sports whole.

Last week, the Knight Commission, a group of college presidents that is
trying to reform college athletics, took testimony about this from Sonny
Vaccaro, executive director of sports for Adidas USA.

Vaccaro said that the decline in college sports began 24 years ago when
a tiny start-up firm called Nike Inc. struck a deal with college coaches
for their teams to wear Nike sneakers.

"The biggest sin you ever made was taking our money," Vaccaro told the
college presidents, "because you sold your souls."

"We have met the enemy and it is us," responded Wake Forest President
Thomas K. Hearn Jr., at the hearing. "But confessing sin is not going to
do us much good unless we take steps to redeem ourselves, and it's the
steps we are trying to figure out."

As perhaps we all should.

Plenty of fans are bitter because money, ads and hype are draining the
fun out of sports. Even worse, what we get for the money is the further
degradation of culture, while lousy commercial values are reinforced in
our kids.

The commercial takeover of the Super Bowl is emblematic of a culture in
which everything is for sale, and every waking moment is an occasion for
an ad. Not much is done for its own sake anymore.

The notion of virtue has a quaint ring to it, and motivation or measures
are usually expressed in dollar terms.

What to do about it? Well, if we all resolved not to buy anything
advertised on the Super Bowl, that would be a start. If we put the TV
into the closet and did something else, that would be even
better.

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Commercial Alert opposes the excesses of commercialism, advertising and
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