S up e o w l T he GeorgeOrwell, Budway Joeand Ling …...2016/02/08 · In 2015, Coke dusted off its ad for the first time in 15years, airing it during a throwback-themed NASCAR race,

The story is so telling that it’s become oneof the cornerstones of Steve Jobs’s legacy. It wasthe spring of 1983, and his company, Apple,had spent the previous four years designingand developing its top-secret Macintosh, the

first mass-market personal computer featuring a mouse, agraphical user interface and a whopping 128 kilobytes of RAM.Sleep-deprived and under pressure to meet a launch date ofJan. 24, 1984, the 28-year-old still had the savvy to realize thathe needed a clarion blast of a TV commercial heralding the newdevice’s rollout—something that matched both the revolutionarypotential of the product and his vision of himself as Cupertino’sresident Zen bomb-thrower. “I want something that will stoppeople in their tracks,” Jobs ordered. “I want a thunderclap.”

He’d get it.Apple’s ad agency at the time was Chiat/Day, a cutting-edge

creative hotbed whose Venice Beach, Calif., office was run bya shaggy, bearded savant named Lee Clow. While Jobs wasn’talways an easy personality to get along with, he and Clow weresimpatico souls—antiestablishment visionaries who believedthey were subverting corporate America from within. Afterweeks of brainstorming, Clow and his Mac team settled on acheeky riff on George Orwell’s future-shock literary classic,1984, with the playful tagline: “. . . See why 1984 won’t be like1984.” They sketched out storyboards for a 60-second TV spot,a mini sci-fi epic featuring a young woman rising up against theevil Thought Police (a not-so-subtle swipe at Apple’s Big Brother

ByChrisNashawaty

George Orwell,Budway Joe andLing Ling theImpolitic PandaA LOOK BACK AT HALFA CENTURY OF SUPERBOWL COMMERCIALSREVEALS JUST HOWMUCH ADVERTISING’SPLACE IN THE GAMEHAS GROWN

FEBRUARY 8, 2016 / SPORTS ILLUSTRATED / 35

Illustration byRussel Tudor

Super Bowl

TheCommercials

competitor, IBM) by hurling a sledgehammer into a giant screen broadcast-ing a numbing mind-control speech to the masses. All their ad needed wassomeone with the filmmaking chops to conjure the spot’s Orwellian vibe andvisual palette. It couldn’t be just another TV commercial, it had to be . . . art.And it had to be ready in time to air during Super Bowl XVIII on Jan. 22.

Ridley Scott didn’t start directing feature films until he was almost 40.Before that, the Royal College of Art graduate had built his reputation produc-ing and directing commercials. But by mid-1983 he was one of Hollywood’smost in-demand directors, having helmed the one-two punch of Alien andBlade Runner. It was the latter film,set in a dystopian future where an-droids and humans are hard to tellapart, that convinced Clow thatScott was the man to sell Apple’spersonal-computing revolution to apublic that didn’t yet know it abso-lutely had to have that $2,495 beigebox. The only question: Why wouldan A-list movie director want to goback to advertising?

“After something like 1,500commercials, I thought I’d earnedthe right to just make movies,” saysScott, whose latest film, The Mar-tian, was nominated last month fora Best Picture Oscar. “I’d servedmy time.” Or so he believed—untilhe received a one-page fax fromClow: the script for the 1984 ad.“I called Lee and asked, What’sApple? They said it was a com-puter, and all I could think at thetime was, So what? Who needs amachine to write shopping lists?What’s the matter with a pad anda pencil? How wrong I was.”

Any misgivings that Scott heldwere eased by the fact that theproduct was nowhere to be seenin the proposed ad. “That was im-mediately attractive to me,” he recalls. “I like advertising to have a bit ofmystery. All they had was that line at the end about 1984. That was riskystuff. How many people out there even knew about George Orwell?”

More than three decades later, budget figures for that 60-second spotare hazy, ranging from $200,000 to $1.5 million. “They knew I wantedto do it, so they really cut my balls off on the budget,” chuckles Scott, whoputs the figure at $250,000 for a two-day shoot at England’s SheppertonStudios. To help save money, he even wrangled 200 extras—local NationalFront skinheads—to play the commercial’s pasty drones.

When Jobs first saw the 1984 ad, he flipped. To him, it both capturedthe essence of spiritual liberation that he believed the personal-computingrevolution promised, and it spread the gospel that Apple was a differentkind of company—a band of cyberpunk pirates taking on the Man.

Then, one month before the Super Bowl, he proudlyshowed it to Apple’s board. They hated it. They hatedit so much, in fact, that they demanded Chiat/Day selloff the two spots they had purchased (one for 30 sec-onds, one for a minute) and get their money back.“All I heard was that Apple didn’t get it,” says Scott.“I thought, Why not? Because it’s pretty f------ great.”

Jobs was crushed. Then, late one night, he playedit for the only other person whose opinion he trusted,

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.Woz, as the legend goes, thought itwas so cool that he offered to reachinto his own pocket and put up halfthe $800,000 cost of airing the60-second ad if Jobs matched him.

In the end it didn’t come to that.In a sly bit of defiance—let’s call itwhat it was, lying—Chiat/Day toldApple’s board that they’d tried sellingthe two spots back to CBS but couldonly unload the 30-second slot. Thatleft them with the longer vacancy,which they’d never even tried to sell.

On Jan. 22, 1984, shortly after theRaiders’ Marcus Allen scored on thefirst of two third-quarter TD runsagainst the Redskins in what wasquickly turning into a blowout, TVscreens from Bangor to Burbankwent dark for a full second. Then,Scott’s bleak black-and-white tab-leau of ashy-complexioned indus-trial workers ominously marchingin lockstep unspooled for 78 millionviewers. There were no sexy sportscars. No easy-on-the-eyes modelsdrinking perspiring bottles of Cokein slo-mo. If anything, Apple’s adwas proof that the revolution wouldbe televised after all.

T HE IRONY isthatdespitethebuzzaroundthat 1984 spot, it didn’t sell many com-puters. It’s hard to fathom now, but theoriginal Mac was a bust. Still, the ad was

a watershed moment in the history of Super Bowlcommercials. Until then America’s biggest, most rec-ognizable brands had been content to simply re-airexisting ads during the Big Game. But 1984 raised thebar forever. Brands immediately began demanding thattheir ad agencies produce buzz-building spots madeexclusively for the Super Bowl—spots that might aironly once but that folks would talk about on Monday.

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SUPER BOWL COMMERCIALS

APPLE, 1984Anya Major, the English actress who slings a

sledgehammer through a screen, was actuallyan established discus thrower.

Just like that, the Super Bowl wasnot only the NFL’s marquee event—it was Madison Avenue’s, too.

Fast-forward 32 years and a30-second commercial airing dur-ing Super Bowl 50 costs somewherein the neighborhood of $5 million.That four-hour block in early Feb-ruary has turned into the ritziesttelevision real estate of the year,ahead of even the Oscars—and it’snot even close. “Apple’s 1984 com-mercial was the switch that flippedeverything,” says former New YorkTimes advertising columnist StuartElliott. “That’s when viewers be-came conditioned to expect new,special, different commercials dur-ing the game—commercials thathad bigger ideas on their mindsthan just, Buy our potato salad.”

When you think about it, itmakes perfect sense: As view-ership becomes more and morefragmented and programmingbecomes more and more target-ed, the Super Bowl is one of thelast mass-audience events left onTV. It’s not just football fans whowatch; it sometimes feel like anunofficial American holiday—a unique once-a-yearnational assembly bringing together our increasinglysecular, pop-culture-obsessed citizenry. “For adver-tisers it’s the closest thing you ever get to a captiveaudience,” says Elliott. “People don’t fast-forwardthrough the commercials because they watch thegame live and they watch it in groups. After 50 SuperBowls they’ve also come to know that if they stoptalking during the commercials, they’ll be rewardedwith some sort of clever or funny or sentimental com-mercial. As an advertiser it’s where you want to be.”

So how did we get here? While 1984 is a huge partof the answer, it’s still only a part. Further back, in

the earliest days of the Super Bowl,the biggest consumer brands cer-tainly understood the game’s powerto reach millions of potential cus-tomers. But each January they’d trotout the same old ads, whether it wasNoxzema hawking its shaving creamwith the help of Joe Namath and Far-rah Fawcett (“Let Noxzema creamyour face”) or those perennial MotorCity stalwarts, Ford and Chevy.

This was the toddler-learning-to-walk stage of Super Bowl com-mercials. Perhaps the first ad amongthis early set to resonate on a deeperemotional level was Coca-Cola’sfamous Mean Joe Greene spot. Al-though it had aired several timesbefore 1980’s Super Bowl XIV (agame which serendipitously pittedGreene’s Steelers against the Rams),that 60-second commercial reachednew heights of three-hankie senti-mentality. Greene was on his lastlegs as a player (and would retireone year later), but over the courseof his career—which included fiveAll-Pro nods—the 6' 4", 275-pounddefensive tackle had earned a repu-tation as the most imposing memberof Pittsburgh’s Steel Curtain defense.So when his lawyer told him thatCoke wanted him for a heartstring-tugging national commercial, hedidn’t quite know what to think.

“I really contemplated not doingit,” says Greene, 36 years later. “Notso much because it went against the‘Mean Joe’ thing, but because actingwasn’t exactly my comfort zone.”

Ultimately, some arm-twisting from his advisers convinced Greenethat he would be nuts to turn down such a high-profile opportunity. Hereluctantly flew to Mount Vernon, N.Y., to shoot the spot, which beginswith a wounded Greene limping down a tunnel, hanging his head, until afawning young fan offers a bottle of Coke. Greene downs the soda in onemammoth swig and, in the end, tosses the kid his game jersey. “Wow!Thanks, Mean Joe!” Then the button line, Have a Coke and a smile.

Unseen in the final cut: Greene’s wrestling with the effects of a day’sworth of soda-swigging. “I drank a lot of Coke that day,” recalls the Hall ofFamer. “And those were the large 16-ounce bottles. The 10-ounce bottles westarted with, my hands were too big and they engulfed the bottle.” Whenthe cameras finally started rolling—after several rehearsals and severaldrained Cokes—the big man couldn’t stop burping as he delivered his lines.


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COCA-COLA, HEY KID, CATCH!In 2015, Coke dusted off its ad for the first timein 15 years, airing it during a throwback-themed

NASCAR race, the Bojangles’ Southern 500.

“I HEARD APPLE DIDN’T GET IT,”SCOTT SAYS OF HIS 1984 AD.

“I THOUGHT, WHY NOT?IT’S PRETTY F------ GREAT.”

The commercial was a national sensation, the closest thing to a viral adin a pre-Internet era, not only because of the cognitive disconnect (Greene’sfearsome rep versus the big-hearted pussycat in the spot) but also becauseit just made people feel good—about celebrity athletes, about Coca-Cola,about America. “The idea of this big rough-and-tough guy and this littlekid had a ‘Kumbaya’ aspect to it,” says Elliott. “Not to mention that thiswas a black football player and a white kid. That wasn’t the kind of thing[advertisers showed] back then very much.”

In the months after the (belch-free) ad played out to an audience of 76 mil-lion during the Super Bowl, Greene was shocked to see old ladies and pint-sizedkids alike walking up to him, offering him their Cokes, asking for autographs.After a decade cracking skulls, Mean Joe Greene was suddenly Mr. Softy.

Of course Greene was hardly the last professional athlete to stifflysell products on TV. From Michael Jordan and Larry Bird’s epic game ofH-O-R-S-E (Super Bowl XXVII, 1993) to David Beckham’s tighty-whitiedBlue Steel poses (SB XLVI, 2012), sometimes it feels as if every runningback, rebounder and rightfielder has a SAG card.

I F THERE was a lesson to be learned from Apple’s 1984 spot, it wasn’tsimply that Super Bowl ads could be edgy and cryptic and cinematic.It was also that brands could grab the public’s fickle attention spanby airing ads specifically created for the Super Bowl—ads that may

not even run again. For exhibit A you need only look five years down the line.In 1988, after a lopsided 42–10 Redskins trouncing of the Broncos in Super

Bowl XXII, Anheuser-Busch scion August Busch III had a novel idea. Becausethe game had been such a blowout, viewers didn’t bother to stick around longenough to see Budweiser’s second-half ads. Since he had no control over thecompetitiveness of the game, Busch wondered, What if we created a series ofSuper Bowl ads, one in each quarter of the game, that actually forced people

to stay tuned—a game to go along with the game?Anheuser-Busch’s longtime ad agency, D’Arcy Ma-

sius Benton & Bowles, took Busch’s marching ordersand came up with . . . the Bud Bowl. A series of five30-second spots pitting anthropomorphic bottles ofBud and Bud Light against one another in a corny, pun-festooned, stop-motion-animated football game, theBud Bowl, as pitched, would become its own event. Inaddition to the already-steep cost of the ads—$675,000for each of four 30-second spots—August ponied upan extra $3 million to NBC and the NFL to becomethe exclusive beer sponsor of the game. Meanwhile,to further guarantee that viewers stuck around evenif the game turned into a rout (and to sell a tsunamiof suds in the lead-up), Busch’s in-house marketingteam came up with a sweepstakes to accompany theblitzkrieg of Bud Bowl spots: In the months leadingup to Super Bowl XXIII, every Bud and Bud Light12-pack included an official scorecard; drinkers wereto follow the game at home, writing down the BudBowl score at the end of each quarter, with the chanceto win $100,000. Sales went through the roof.

As juvenile and groan-inducing as Bud Bowl I was(players celebrated with “high-sixes”; one kicker wasnamed Budski), in terms of pure advertising it was asmash. Anheuser-Busch sold beer so briskly that theBud Bowl franchise was kept alive until 1997, whenthe public’s interest finally went flat. In fact, the buzzleading up to that debut Bud Bowl in ’89 was so fever-

BlindSpots

5 Holiday Inn, Bob JohnsonSB XXXI 1997

hing to tell public about

e face-lift its giving itstels, Holiday

unexpectedmakeover. The setting is a highschool class reunion where Tom,a clueless motormouth, walks upto a smoking-hot member of theclass of ’75. He can’t place her. Thenit hits him: This stunner is none otherthan Bob Johnson—who’s now a she!The reaction shot is one of puredisgust. Guess which hotel chainthe transgender community won’tbe frequenting.

4 Cash4Gold, MC Hammer andEd McMahon SB XLIII 2009

thing keepsotball fans

n upbeatper Sunday

quitef washed-up,

cash-strapped B-list celebritiesbragging about how much doughthey raised by selling off their24-karat valuables. Here, Hammerand McMahon, ahem, humorouslyboast about hocking their goldcuff links, gold records and goldhip replacements. The cruelestcut: a depressed McMahon’scaressing his gilded toilet and saying,“Goodbye, old friend.” Hiyoooo!

LET’S NOT PRETENDTHAT EVERY SUPER BOWLCOMMERCIAL BEATS WITHJOE GREENE’S HEART, THATBEHIND EVERY AD THERE’S ABUDDING RIDLEY SCOTT. HERE,THE LEAST-SUPER MADISONAVENUE OFFERINGS OF THEPAST HALF CENTURY


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ish that USA Today capitalized on the opportunity tocreate its Super Bowl Ad Meter, polling the public’sreaction to the Big Game’s commercials and gradingthem from best to worst. Says Elliott, who worked atUSA Today at the time, “The idea that an advertiseras big as Anheuser-Busch was making such a com-mitment and went through that much expense was asignal to a lot of other advertisers that they should lookto the Super Bowl as a special spotlight opportunity.

“When the Ad Meter started, it really said some-thing that one of the nation’s biggest national news-papers was using the same polling resources for thesecommercials that they used for presidential elections.”Overnight, how we felt about Super Bowl commercialsbecame quantifiable. They were the new box office.

One can understand how a prospective advertisertaking this all in could reach the conclusion that de-spite the enormous costs, shoot-the-moon ad gambitscouldn’t miss. That conclusion, of course, would have

been wrong. Three years after Bud Bowl I, in the build-up to the 1992 SummerOlympics, Reebok launched a similarly splashy series of commercials duringSuper Bowl XXVI featuring a pair of telegenic American decathletes, DanO’Brien and Dave Johnson. Ostensibly the spots were selling the company’sPump Graphlite cross-training sneaker, its latest attempt to steal some ofNike’s market share. But what they were really selling was a contrived,cooked-up rivalry between two guys no one had ever heard of before.

O’Brien and Johnson were the two biggest favorites to win the decathlonin Barcelona—the only question was, Who would take home the gold andwho would settle for silver? That January, while the Redskins crushed theBills in Minneapolis, Reebok filled the airwaves with five expensive stars-and-stripes spots featuring grainy home-movie footage of the two hopefulsas little kids while a stentorian narrator rattled off their accomplishments.(“Dan can run the hundred meters in 10.3 seconds. . . . Dave can high-jump6' 103⁄4". . . .”) Dan or Dave—who’ll be the world’s greatest athlete?

Then the unthinkable happened. Five weeks before the Games, O’Brienmissed the pole vault three times at the U.S. trials in New Orleans. Hewouldn’t even travel to Spain. Johnson did make the team, but with a stressfracture in his left foot, he barely managed to win bronze. The campaignwas a colossal flop—the New Coke of Super Bowl ads.

W HILE THE teams (mostly) change from year to year, there’sa remarkable consistency to the pomp and pageantry sur-rounding the NFL’s marquee event. Super Bowl commer-cials, on the other hand, are less predictable, always chang-

ing. From the quaint catchphrase-coining biddies for Wendy’s (“Where’s theBeef?”) in the mid-1980s to GoDaddy’s jiggle-shock sexism in the mid-2000sto Clint Eastwood’s postrecession Halftime in America spot for Chrysler in ’12,they tend to reflect the culture in a way that the game doesn’t.

3 Groupon, Save the Money—Tibet SB XLV 2011

thisfunny, poorly

ceived andensitive plug

r the youngany, actor

Timothy Hutton begins by talkingabout the plight of the Tibetanpeople—then abruptly jackknifesinto the great deal he got onHimalayan fish curry, thanks toone of the company’s discounts.Great, so he’s also shortchangingTibetan refugees trying to scratchout a living in America! Grouponpulled the ad a few days afterthe game.

2 Dirt Devil, Fred AstaireSB XXXI 1997

g before hologram

upac wassmerizingachella-goers,s up its line of

broom vacs by pairing the householdcleaning appliance with the lateFred Astaire, who had died a decadeearlier of pneumonia. He certainlylooks graceful, and the product surelooks easy to use. . . . But there’ssomething a bit exploitative and,well, kinda creepy about watchingone of Hollywood’s most belovedentertainers ghoulishly hawkingcleaning aids from beyond.

1 Salesgenie, PandasSB XLII 2008

ith a toneness rivaling

ickey Rooney’sr. Yunioshi ineakfast atts out a grab

bag of offensive Asian stereotypes.The animated ad, set at Ling Ling’sBamboo Furniture Shack, focuseson the panda proprietors of a failingbusiness who employ Salesgenieto resurrect their operation. Howwould “100 free sales leads” helpthese pandas upgrade to a bamboosuperstore? Who cares when thereare so many more troubling issuesto grapple with here? —C.N.


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ANHEUSER-BUSCH, BUD BOWL IBud won six of eight games over Bud Light—butnot always honestly. In one win, they employed

a crane and blimp to stop the winning TD.

Super Bowl XXV between theGiants and the Bills, for example,played out during the height of theGulf War, on Jan. 27, 1991. OperationDesert Storm had started just 10 daysearlier and was so on the minds ofthe country that ABC preempted thegame’s halftime show for Peter Jen-nings’s report on the progress of theconflict. And while the game itselfwas little affected, the tenor of thatSuper Bowl’s commercials was de-cidedly more sober and sedate thanusual. “A lot of advertisers completelypulled out,” Elliott points out. “Andsome, like Coca-Cola, yanked theirhumorous ads and ran serious, som-ber ones instead.”

E l e v e n y e a r s l a t e r , a tSuper Bowl XXXVI, the nationalmood could not have been more raw.Less than five months after the at-tacks of 9/11, advertisers were un-sure how to make the art of sellinglook seemly. How do you acknowl-edge a tragedy without appearinglike you’re exploiting it? It may havebeen the trickiest and finest linethat Madison Avenue has ever hadto walk. Says Grant Pace, executivecreative director at the Boston-based agency Conover Tuttle Pace, “It waslike when Saturday Night Live asked if it was O.K. to laugh again.”

While most of that year’s Super Bowl commercials erred on the side of taste-ful caution, one ad seemed to walk that fine line with more confidence andcreativity than the rest: Budweiser’s Respect spot. The 60-second ad, whichaired only once, was directed by Zack Snyder (300; Batman v Superman), whoused Anheuser-Busch’s oldest and most beloved symbols to convey reassur-ance that while the world had changed in horrible ways, certain traditionswill always endure. In the commercial, Budweiser’s Clydesdales travel information east across the snowy heartland. They cross the Brooklyn Bridge,stop to look in the direction of the Statue of Liberty, then turn and bend theirhooves, bowing toward Ground Zero and the Manhattan skyline. When it’sover, there’s no tagline, no sales pitch. Just the Budweiser logo. “There was areal purity of motivation that I hope comes across in the commercial,” saysSnyder. “As an advertiser it felt like the only way we could express ourselves. Adancer would have danced, a singer would have written a song—all we had wasthis medium, so we tried to express our emotions through the commercial.”

Pace, one of the brains behind the original Bud Bowl spots, can stillrecall the exact moment the Respect commercial aired. “I remember sittingthere stunned. Every note was just right. I’ve been doing this for a longtime, but they nailed it. It wasn’t just one of the best Super Bowl com-mercials I’d ever seen, it was more than that. It was exactly what we allneeded, at the exact moment we needed it, on the biggest stage there is.”

S O, AFTER 50 years andthousands of commer-cials, where does thatleave us now? Consider

it a sign of the times that on Feb. 7you won’t even have to turn on yourTV to answer that question. Onecan already find this year’s ad salvoon YouTube and Facebook. “In theold days, you would never tell any-one what your Super Bowl ad wasgoing to be; people had to watchit during the game,” says Elliott.“Now, with social media, you canrelease them early and build buzz.Old Spice’s “I’m on a horse” ad from2010 and the Volkswagen DarthVader ad from ’11 were the epitomeof that. They got millions of views

before the game even happened.”In the past week, brands like Bud Light, Honda

and Amazon have uploaded teasers of their latestbarrage of Super Bowl commercials. And if there’san early theme to be divined, it’s that in 2016 humor,celebrities and cute puppies still sell. (At least, that’sthe hope.) Bud Light’s 30-second spot—the onewhere comedians Seth Rogen and Amy Schumermoisturize and squeeze into Spanx, getting dolledup for a Bud Light party—has already registeredmore than a million views.

It’s no doubt an exciting moment for advertiserstrying to cast the widest net possible. But whatabout for the rest of us? Today, with the state ofsocial media, it’s not just that we’re able to see thelatest Super Bowl commercials before the game—wecan’t avoid them even if we want to. Look down atyour phone, check your Facebook or Twitter feed,and there are Rogen and Schumer, again and again.After the 10th time, you might want to buy a CoorsLight just out of spite. But if it keeps going this way,it’s easy to imagine a not-too-distant future thatlooks a lot like Apple’s 1984 commercial. ±


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“A DANCER WOULD HAVEDANCED, A SINGER WOULDHAVE WRITTEN A SONG,”SNYDER SAYS OF 9/11. “ALLWE HAD WAS THIS MEDIUM.”

REEBOK, DAN AND DAVEWhat disappointed ad fans missed: After

flopping at the 1992 trials, Dan O’Brien cameback and won decathlon gold in ’96.

S up e o w l T he GeorgeOrwell, Budway Joeand Ling …...2016/02/08 · In 2015, Coke dusted off its ad for the first time in 15years, airing it during a throwback-themed NASCAR race,

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