If you’ve been around a while, you know that Super Bowl ads used to have a lot of cultural significance in this country. Before anyone had a cellphone, and before high-speed Internet access was widespread, there was a lot less “content” for people to watch for hours on end. But pretty much everyone did watch the Super Bowl. And they knew that major corporations, with this rare opportunity to reach a large audience, would put some effort into being as creative and entertaining as possible. And it really didn’t take much because, again, there wasn’t any competition with the Internet or social media. Budweiser managed to transfix the entire country back in 2000 with their Super Bowl ad where a bunch of guys called each other — on landlines — and said, “Whassup?” over and over again. Was it high art? No. But it was good enough.
Today’s Super Bowl ads, by contrast, provide virtually zero entertainment value to anyone. They are soulless and uninteresting, probably by design. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore them. Because if you pay attention to the ads that played during the Super Bowl, then you know that they communicated, at various points, the exact same message as the halftime show — which is that white people are now second-class citizens in the country they built.
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