The Super Bowl is a group oriented event. It's a time for friends and family. Fathers and sons, and more often anymore females of the family, get together to watch the game and root for their chosen team. I probably won't watch it, because I'm sick of it. It's turned into a spectacle. At halftime some asshat gets out to promote his latest CD, complete with dancers, jugglers, and fire-eaters, and if most people are like me, they take this opportunity to fix sandwiches for the second half.
But even the game has gotten monotonous. No one plays football anymore, it's a race to see who can score the most points, period. A real football game is the opposite, an attempt to prevent your opponent from scoring. That sounds like a distinction without a difference, but it is more pronounced than it sounds. The best games in history usually involve a total of less than twenty points scored by both sides in the entirety of the game.
Now, if a player just holds the ball over the goal line, it's a touchdown, even if his body otherwise never gets near the goal line. This is supposed to increase the excitement level, but all it does is detract from the intended spirit of the game, which is supposed to be more of a blend of offense and defense than is the standard of today.
For mainly this reason, although I'll be rooting for New Orleans in their first Super Bowl appearance, I probably won't be watching. Many others will, however, and advertisers will shell out massive amounts of money for a premium advertising spot. Many others will try, but there will not be enough space for all of them, so many will be turned away. Such as the following one-
Naturally, CBS is receiving complaints for their decision to not accept this ad, and even more for accepting an ad starring college football player Tim Tebow and his mother in a spot from Focus On The Family which is pro-life, or anti-abortion, in orientation. The gist of the ad is that Tebow's mom was strongly advised by doctors to abort Tebow, but she refused to do so. He went on to become a two-time Heissmann Trophy winner. No mean feat, that.
Bear in mind, this is not an ad that is advocating for the outlaw of abortion. This is simply a public service spot urging people to make their own private decisions on behalf of life, to not terminate a pregnancy, with young Tebow presented as an example of why, in their opinion, all life is sacred and important, possibly more than we can know.
The challenge for the pro-abortion rights crowd then becomes simple and obvious. Make an ad that encourages expectant mothers to get abortions, for their own financial and emotional well-being perhaps. Don't advocate for more laws, just follow the Tebow model, encourage abortion as a matter of private choice and initiative. After all, how many babies are going to grow up to be Tim Tebow? He is the exception to the rule. When a doctor advises a woman to terminate a pregnancy, it is far more often than not for sound medical reasons, and listening to any other kind of advice can actually be ill-advised in the vast majority of cases. You can even make the case that the Tebow ad is actually quite irresponsible, as his case is such a rarity.
If you do it in a tasteful manner, maybe you can one day sponsor your own Super Bowl ad. But the minute you bring a political, or for that matter a commercial aspect to the ad, you're almost certainly guaranteeing a rejection.
Again, this is a family oriented event, at least so far as its place on broadcast television goes. No one wants to see political advocacy here, and the programmers at CBS realize this.
The above ad I linked is just silly, and comes across more as an in-your-face stunt than it does a serious advertisement. It wouldn't bother me, but surely these people can understand why most wouldn't want to have to deal with something like this in front of their children during the Super Bowl. Or maybe they just don't care. If they did, they would have presented a tasteful ad with a reasonable appeal to the homosexual community to utilize Mancrunch as a gay dating service, much the way standard dating sites do. How many times do you see these on-line dating sites utilizing advertising that portrays heavy make-out sessions among their clients? You don't. You probably never will, because one, they know it would be offensive and two, they want to be taken seriously.
CBS has the right to make what they consider the proper business decision with their projected audience in mind. Anybody that wants to play in that league should understand the ground rules going in and be willing to abide by them. Otherwise, they really have no grounds for complaint.
