Missing Link: Super Bowl? Super commercial!
The football final in the USA is an unparalleled TV spectacle. The IT industry is also taking part in the competition to burn a lot of money with advertising.
Apple's Super Bowl commercial "1984" changed the game for everyone.
(Image: TBWA/Apple)
The 59th Super Bowl will be held in the USA on Sunday. The decision on the winner of the past football season is a huge spectacle, accompanied by an extravagant half-time show and many interruptions for advertising. Whereas a 30-second commercial during the first Super Bowl in 1967 cost 37,500 US dollars, today it costs 7 to 8 million US dollars. In addition to advertising for beer, cars and chips, the IT industry has also been a regular participant since 1977 – with spectacular tops (Apple) and incredible flops (Apple).
The Super Bowl is the final of the US professional football league NFL (National Football League), whose roots go back to 1920. The rival American Football League (AFL) was established in 1960. In 1967, the champions of both leagues met for the first time, and the match has officially been called the "Super Bowl" since 1969. In 1970, the two leagues merged to form the NFL.
Golden age of TV
In the age of television, the sporting event developed into a TV spectacle with the highest viewing figures. For many companies, advertising during the breaks in play, usually 30-second spots, is the prelude to strategic advertising campaigns designed to increase brand awareness. This year it is the newcomer Bosch, which has been present in the USA for 139 years, but whose brand is not yet widely known. The claim "The more you Bosch, the more you feel like a Bosch" aims to change that.
For a long time, the Super Bowl was even a favorable advertising opportunity in terms of viewing figures, primarily for the many beer brands that are consumed while watching football. It was not until 1995 that the total advertising revenue broke the magic sound barrier at 1.15 million dollars. Today, we can only smile about that: Bosch bought its place in the advertising sun for 7 million US dollars. A boss move.
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The history of information technology commercials began in 1977 in a rather Christian way. In a scriptorium, the monk Dominik was given the task of reproducing a tract. In desperation, Brother Dominik turns to a Xerox copy center, where he is quickly helped. A miracle has happened! The commercial for office copiers starring Jewish comedian Jack Eagle was so successful that Xerox developed several versions, including a multimedia "Anniversary Edition" in 2017.
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Advertising monk Jack Eagle appeared at numerous Xerox promotional events and ended up knowing the range of machines on offer better than some salespeople. His son Ian became one of the best-known television commentators of the Super Bowls.
In 1978, the first computer came to the Super Bowl: The Wang company advertised its word processing systems and used the biblical story of David's battle against Goliath. David, of course, was Wang and Goliath was supposed to be IBM. Although IBM initially refused to advertise at sporting events, the company reacted and gave Wang the finger, so to speak, with a tiny chip in the 1979 "Chips" commercial.
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IBM's next Super Bowl commercial appeared in 1988 with "Signals", in which "Big Blue" tried to translate the announcement of an IBM product into football language. For the actual premiere of the AS/400, the company had the luxury of hiring the crew of the TV series M.A.S.H., with Alan Alda in the leading role. This caused confusion, as Alda was actually the central advertising figure for Atari.
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Atari had already made its debut at the Super Bowl in 1982. "Little Boy" shows an adult who, like a little boy, devotes himself entirely to the video game Breakout and ends up being admired as a proud father. The aforementioned Alan Alda, who unpacked an Atari and connected it to the television in 26 seconds in the 1984 commercial, was also proud. The trade journal Ad Age reported that the scene had to be rehearsed dozens of times before Alda managed to stay under the required 30 seconds.
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The IBM competitor in the Charlie Chaplin look, who worked on the PCJr with its infrared keyboard for IBM in 1984, and the well-known US actor Bill Bixby ("The Incredible Hulk"), who explained the fully assembled Tandy 2000 in a lunar landscape, had a more comfortable time.
The three commercials quickly disappeared into the "further afield" category, because 1984 was the moment of Apple's famous 1984, the commercial for the unseen Apple Macintosh, coined by Ridley Scott (Blade Runner), which made history several times over. It began with the 400,000 US dollar production costs for the film shot in London, for which a few punks from the street were recruited for 120 dollars, and almost ended with the rejection of the commercial by Apple's supervisory board.
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Of the advertising space purchased for 900,000 dollars, Apple was still able to sell on 30 seconds and showed a correspondingly shortened version. In the Orwell script "1984 won't be like '1984" by the advertising agency Chiat/Day, Big Brother was supposed to mumble incomprehensible sentences, but Ridley Scott sat down and wrote a complete speech that seems strangely familiar from today's perspective. Big Brother, played by British actor David Graham, celebrated the Information Putification Directive:
My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For today we celebrate the first, glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!
During Big Brother's speech, a blonde runner throws a hammer into the big screen and blitzes the gray zombies, who listened to the speech and then woke up from their lethargy. The advertising world was also shocked by the commercial, which won over 30 awards.
Apple also won: in the first year, the manufacturer sold 280,000 Macs, while IBM sold a mere 10,000 PCJr. Apple then changed agencies and still tried to advertise with the zombie concept. In 1985, "Lemmings" was shown at the Super Bowl and promptly voted the worst commercial.
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What was perhaps even worse for Apple: Lemmings advertised a combination of hardware and software called "The Macintosh Office", a product that did not exist in this form. It wasn't until 1999 that Apple had another major advertising success with "Hal" at the Super Bowl. A long zoom on the eye of the movie supercomputer Hal 9000 tells the (false) story that many computers failed at the turn of the year 2000, while only the Macintosh mastered the date-critical turn of the year.
The extent to which "1984" influenced computer advertising can be seen in the Super Bowl commercial"Empower the People – the tablet to create a better world", with which Motorola tried to position its Xoom tablet against the iPad in 2011. The protagonist read Orwell's 1984 on his tablet amidst all the Apple zombies and created a bouquet of flowers for his beloved. The commercial was highly praised, but the Xoom soon disappeared without a trace.
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Computer manufacturer Wang has also disappeared meanwhile, but not before he made a name for himself a second time at the Super Bowl with a spectacular commercial. Wang geared up for an advertising campaign in 1986 under the new company boss Fred Wang, which this time took direct aim at the enemy. With the slogan "We're gunning for IBM" and a commercial based on the movie "The Flying Eye", Wang wanted to attract attention, but when founder An Wang saw the ad at the Super Bowl, he stopped the campaign.
Would it be possible to cushion the reactions to a looming disaster with a commercial? Intel tried it at the 1995 Super Bowl with a flyover of the flawless Pentium processor in a flying machine built according to plans by Leonardo da Vinci. The FDIV bug became public knowledge at this time. More successful for Intel was the commercial in which the Pentium MMX was presented in 1997 and the bunny suits from the clean room danced to "Play that Funky Music".
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In 1997 and 1998, however, the Super Bowl ads were filled with a different theme: the Internet wanted to be explained and advertised. In 1997, the online service Compuserve afforded itself the luxury of showing viewers nothing whatsoever for 15 seconds with"Not Busy" and only broadcasting the busy signal – as an indication of how busy its competitors' telephone lines were. Competitor MCI explained what emoticons are and showed in a second spot that the Internet works in space.
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Lotus showed how value creation works with "Capitalism". Comedian Denis Leary shows his horror at all the people who browse the web instead of doing real work, as Lotus Domino allows. In the following year, AT&T showed how quickly a rumor can spread in the new media with"Bobby Templeton" in a humorous and very educational way.
In 1998, Iomega was at the top of the list of completely unsuccessful Super Bowl commercials. At the time when the first news of the "Click of Death" was making the rounds, the company produced a commercial featuring a flight over the Bermuda Triangle in which the passengers and crew suddenly disappeared –, as did the data backed up on an Iomega ZIP drive.
A similar thing happened to Computer Associates, who wanted to use their"Amnesia" commercial to promote the need to back up data with Brightstor. After all, unconscious managers are not as worrying as panicking IT staff who suspect a hacker attack on their network and trigger nuclear war. That's what you could see in the Network Associates commercial, which also ran in 1998.
The IT service provider EDS did it better, showing the work of system integrators in a commercial with tough cowboys who had to do the toughest of tough jobs. According to the cast list, only seven trained cats were used for the filming.
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The EDS commercial aired during the 2000 Super Bowl, which became commonly known as the "Dotcom Bowl". The dotcom bubble had reached its greatest expansion and 21 dotcom companies had nothing better to do than advertise their non-existent or barely recognizable services, spending 44 million dollars to do so. Representative of many are the sock puppets of Pets.com, a company that disappeared from the Internet in the same year and was dissolved in 2001.
Dotcom sock puppets
Financial services provider E*Trade took the cake by making a monkey dance on a barrel and then mocking the fact that it had spent 2 million US dollars on the nonsense. E*Trade survived the bursting of the bubble and had the monkey ride through a ghost town in 2001, taking the last remaining sock puppet with it.
The repetition as the Crypto Bowl in 2022 was not quite as spectacular, with Coinbase, Crypto.com, eToro and the crypto exchange FTX setting the tone with their commercials. The fact that a political commercial disparaging the then incumbent President Joe Biden was allowed for the first time this year due to pressure from the Republicans caused far more of a stir.
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As mentioned at the beginning, Bosch is now competing as a newcomer in the upcoming Super Bowl. In the best advertising tradition, the company has so far only released a teaser in which actor Antonio Banderas opens a jar of pickles for a muscle-bound macho man in front of an open Bosch refrigerator.
Another German company had broken this rule in one of its many Super Bowl commercials: In 2011, Volkswagen showed "The Force" in full in advance. Even before the kick-off, the ad was seen by 16 million amused people. Last year, the crisis-ridden company's last commercial at the Super Bowl, "An American Love Story", was a nostalgic reminder of the USA's immigrant society. It felt like a farewell.
(vza)
