Focus on the Family's Super Bowl Ad Violence - Charlie Warner - MediaBizBloggers

The Focus on the Family39s Super Bowl commercial featuring Tim Tebow tackling his mother is typical of the antiabortion movement39s twisted thinking Using violence to support their position against using violence to kill nascent lifeIt39s the same type of twisted thinking that causes righttolife fanatics to murder doctors who perform abortions to stop them from what these selfappointed moral policemen consider to be the murder of a fetusThe Tebow commercial was also a symbolic flag bearer for how low and twisted the thinking of television commercial producers advertising agencies and CBS have become The only exception was the brilliantly conceived and executed Google commercialIf you were not a thirtysomething or younger chipeating beerswilling insensitive immature macho male you probably noticed the distinctive misogynistic tone of many of the commercialsThose commercials that weren39t stereotyping and insulting and doing violence to women gays dwarves and the elderly were overthe top overproduced dull unfunny illogical messes most of which were embarrassed to show the name of their product until near the end of the commercialThe only exception was the Google commercial that showed the product name from the beginning and intelligently demonstrated how to use the product to do something useful romantic and uplifting which included moving to France which I suppose implied getting away from American overcommercializationCBS made some counterproductive decisions to group commercials according to some supposedly and weirdly related theme For example there was an abusetheelderly pod in which Betty White and Tim Tebow39s mother were violently tackled Or a nopants pod with CareerBuildercom and Dockers commercials in it Or a magicalplaces pod with the coupling of Disney39s quotAlice in Wonderlandquot film with KISS for Dr Pepper featuring dwarves rocking outThe halftime show was the best in years not because of the aging members of The Who who played OK windmill moves and all but because of the awesome computerized laser light show and mindblowing lightrevolving stage amp8211 an exploding celebration for the eyes not necessarily for the earsIn the second half there was an Audi commercial that touted its green energysaving car which was fine to promote but doing so in a commercial with a cast of perhaps a hundred that must have cost over 1 million to produce wasted more energy to create than 100 Audi39s could save in a month This is another example of ad agencies reaching into the upper levels of cognitive dissonance to make a pointIf you want to promote green do like Google did amp8211 show a demonstration of the benefits of using the product It39s ironic and symbolic of Google that its commercial was probably the least expensive to produce most efficient in the use of resources and was by far the most effective It39s a lesson of rational and effective advertising amp8211 a lesson that probably went over the heads of Focus on the Family and most advertising agenciesAnd oh by the way it was a really good football game which of course has become incidental to the overthetop materialistic consumptiongorging culture of commercialism which I am hypocritically honoring by writing about the Super Bowl commercials and not about the gameUntil he retired in 2002 Charlie Warner was Vice President of AOL39s Interactive Marketing division Before joining AOL he was the Goldenson Endowed Professor at the Missouri Journalism School where he taught media management and sales and he created and ran the annual Management Seminar for News Executives Charlie can be contacted at charleshwarnergmailcomRead all Charlieamp8217s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Charlie Warner MediaBizBloggersFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBlogger

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Focus on the Family's Super Bowl Ad Violence - Charlie Warner - MediaBizBloggers

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