The Super Bowl is nigh again, which means the annual rodeo of Super Bowl TV commercials.
As I've written in the past, the idea of convincing people that they should watch the Super Bowl telecast for the commercials is the National Football League's most brilliant marketing stunt ever.
That's because it inoculates the telecast from viewer abandonment if the game is a low-scoring yawner or a high-scoring borefest.
It draws in viewers who have no interest in football. Blowout by halftime? There are still 2 { hours of ads, right? It provides secondary grist for newspapers and TV talk shows in the week before the game, and another bounce in the week after, when the talk shows turn to reviewing the ads we saw on Super Bowl Sunday.
This year the buzz is about big-money ad buys by billionaire presidential candidates Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. The star of the show, however, is said to be a golden retriever who beat cancer thanks to the veterinary school at the University of Wisconsin. The school will be featured in the commercial, but so will WeatherTech, the auto accessories firm whose CEO owns the dog.
The other commercials have been "leaked" to the press, as some stories put it, but that's a joke. "Leaked," as in disclosed without the permission of the sponsors? Any ad exec who can't get his commercial mentioned in the countless pregame rundowns will be looking for another job on Monday.
The truth, of course, is that the annual competition for an eye-catching commercial is all in vain, because the battle was won 36 years ago. There's only been one truly great Super Bowl commercial, and it was produced for Apple, which used it to introduce its original Macintosh computer.
The year was 1984, and Apple made the most of the Orwellian resonance of "1984" by portraying its product as a piece of liberating technology. The ad was a milestone, not only because of its narrative vigor, but because it actually was responsible for turning the telecast into an annual marketing tournament.
If you haven't seen it, the commercial begins in gray, with an army of drones marching into an assembly as a Big Brother figure harangues them from a towering screen.
The scene is intercut with shots of a blond woman in a white tank top and bright red shorts on the run, carrying a mallet, pursued by storm troopers. She bursts into the assembly and flings the mallet at the screen, unleashing an explosion and a blast of fresh air, as a voice-over reads the text of a product launch scheduled for two days hence: "On Jan. 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984.'"
I first wrote about the stature of the ad six years ago, on its 30th anniversary. That original column is reproduced below, in updated and edited form.
