By Jay Bookman, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
February 8, 2010,
Advertising agencies get paid good money to know a culture’s soft underbelly, to spot consumer insecurities and exploit them to maximum advantage. You might say that commercials represent our collective dream world, playing back to us the sum total of our fears and hopes and anxieties.
So it was pretty interesting to see — between extended periods of excellent football — the spate of Super Bowl ads advising American men how to reclaim or cling to or even surrender their last remaining claims to traditional masculinity.
Is that really what we have come to circa 2010? Does the American male really feel that threatened? Madison Avenue certainly seems to think so.
Advertisers have long tried to identify their products with certain aspects of masculinity or femininity, so the approach itself is nothing new. Former Raiders star Howie Long, for example, pitches Chevy pickup trucks as a means to dramatize your heterosexuality. And beer companies have always appealed to masculine identity through commercials such as Miller Lite’s famous “man law” series from a few years ago, featuring Burt Reynolds. (I hereby propose this as an irrefutable man law: The more insipid, weak and tasteless the beer, the more heavily it pushes “manliness.” Think of it as overcompensation, a “little beer’s complex”.)
But you couldn’t help but notice that this year’s Super Bowl featured ad after ad taking that approach, pitching an unusually broad range of products from slacks to soap to electronics to cars to investing. It’s hard to believe that was coincidental, that so many sponsors just accidentally decided to aim their pitch in that direction.
More likely, their surveys and focus groups were all picking up something in the culture that they thought they could manipulate on their clients’ behalf. Maybe it reflects a bad economy in which men have taken by far the largest hit, with traditionally male manufacturing and construction jobs disappearing and women outnumbering men in the workforce for the first time.
But in American culture, the pinnacle of masculinity is probably to be the MVP of the Super Bowl. And on that one, I’d say Drew Brees got it exactly right, going 32 of 39 to tie the Super Bowl record for completions as those Saints went marching into history.
And afterward, this:
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