Super Bowl Vigilantes Strike Again

As we predicted in Super Bow Vigilantes, guardians of the public order have taken down a Super Bowl spot for being offensive.

The New York Times reports that SalesGenie.com has announced that it will no longer run a spot with a talking panda bear that had a Chinese accent.

The spot is offensive on many levels. Not least of which is how dreadful it is. Exactly the kind of free speech that needs protecting.



On the other hand, the thought police seem to think it's ok to stereotype Indians. Salesgenie's spot that does that is apparently just fine and will continue running.

Big, Dumb, Expensive Super Bowl Ads

As advertisers get conned by agency and media hype into believing that their Super Bowl buys are just a promotional platform, they are forgetting something -- if the spots are no good, the rest is irrelevant.

Continuing a dreadful trend, Super Bowl commercials got bigger, more expensive and stupider than ever this year. Production once again trumped concept.

The majority were witless and unoriginal. The tired formulas of talking animals, talking babies, irrelevant celebrities, and frat house tit jokes were trotted out for the LXIInd time. The bad old days of dot-com style advertising seem to be creeping back -- 28 seconds of something incomprehensible followed by a 2 second logo.

A few mentions:

~ GoDaddy, as usual, led the way in idiocy.
~ CareerBuilder got the crap it deserved after firing the agency that made them famous.
~ Bud Light "fire breathing" was funny. "Flying" was not.
~ My favorite spot was for Tide (the talking shirt.) Not only was it funny, it actually made a point.
~ Biggest and dumbest award to Under Armour.

As I write this I realize how few of the spots I just watched I can recall.

Super Bowl Vigilantes

Super Bowl Sunday is a great day for sports, a huge day for advertising, and a lousy day for the First Amendment.

It's the one day of the year that every interest group and every advocacy group has its thought police on duty (see this from USA Today) looking for any ad that might be "offensive" to them. It's the day that advertisers and agencies fold like single-ply toilet paper when some spokesman for some cause issues a press release about their "offensive" spot.

Am I in favor of offending people? No.

But I am in favor of free speech. And the whole idea of the First Amendment is to protect your right and mine to offend whomever the hell we want whenever the hell we want to.

It's a right that is quickly disappearing.