This year’s Super Bowl began, as always, with a coin toss—and that might be the perfect metaphor for what’s unfolding in the marketing industry, because there are two sides to the story of the Big Game.

On one side is the undeniable power of live sports to reach a massive audience. This year’s Super Bowl reached 99 million viewers on NBC, which is why advertisers paid up to $7 million for a 30-second commercial. The Super Bowl is one of the last places where a brand can reach millions of people who have become increasingly disinterested in linear TV.

On the barren wasteland of our fractured media landscape, the Super Bowl stands alone, a beautiful relic of the golden age of television.

Cable is dying and broadcast TV is on life support, barely hanging on thanks to your DVR. This multi-year trend has, of course, been accelerating with the rise of streaming and cord-cutting. But like a weak defensive line, the major TV networks have responded by running the same losing playbook again and again.

Sanitized sitcoms and derivative dramas that lack any edge are failing to compete with streaming platforms, even though viewers still mostly watch sitcoms and dramas. The standards, censors and sensibilities of the major networks are archaic.

Why isn’t “Ted Lasso” on NBC every Thursday night like “Friends” was back in the day? According to the pablum parameters for broadcast TV, shows like “Seinfeld,” “Friends” or “How I Met Your Mother” would be produced by Netflix or HBO or Apple if developed today. As it stands, that’s where their loyal viewers find them now.

Which brings us back to football. This year’s Big Game aired on NBC and sister streaming platform Peacock, but sports are late to the streaming party—maybe too late to recapture lost viewers. That’s the other side of the ratings coin: Traditional sports viewership is down dramatically from a decade ago. Sure, millions of eyeballs still means millions in ad revenue, and NBC certainly needed a boost during the least-watched Olympics in history, but consider the longitudinal trend before you start buying TV as a long-term investment.

The average NFL viewer is 50 years old. By contrast, the most coveted demographic for advertisers is typically 18-34. To be fair, the Super Bowl is a cultural spectacle that draws a broad audience, but it would be naïve to think its long-term appeal isn’t tied to being the pinnacle of a sport that’s losing fans to UFC championships, mobile gaming, eSports, the Fortnite World Cup or the latest TikTok challenge.

The defining characteristic of younger fans isn’t their devotion (or lack thereof) to a single sport, it’s their shrinking attention spans and innate desire to stay socially current. That could mean posting about the game if it’s an overtime nail-biter, but it could just as easily mean skipping the second half if the outcome is a lopsided blowout, or merely watching highlights after the game is over.

In other words, if it’s boring, it’s gone. On to the next thing, and the next. That’s as true for brands as it is for sporting events when it comes to Gen Z. If you’re not part of my now, you might not be around tomorrow.

Speaking of which, a missed opportunity that gets lip service every year from agencies and clients alike involves second-screen behavior. Ninety million people is a sizable sample for marketing experiments.

Before your brand rushes headlong into the metaverse, maybe you should explore the gamification of TV. Find the intersection of live sports, fantasy leagues, betting apps and mobile gaming. As your audience skews younger, the behavioral overlap turns into a beautiful, multi-layered Venn diagram that’s filled with cash.

Spontaneity, surprise and social currency are the keys to modern entertainment. That’s why this football season saw a welcome jump in viewership. By sheer happenstance, more games were closer, delivering more reversals and fourth-quarter miracles. There’s nothing like an upset to make fans happy. A sport that had become ponderous in its predictability managed to surprise us.

Said another way, football was entertaining, and that’s what the Super Bowl is supposed to be all about. Which brings us to the commercials ...

Marketing mavens and creative directors have already waxed publicly and whined privately about this year’s panoply of Big Game spots. So in quick succession I’ll focus on the good, the interesting and the scary.

Most of this year’s commercials were fun, and that’s good—a refreshing break from last year’s earnest fare. Props to Squarespace for maximum charm. And though the laconic likability of Matthew McConaughey wasn’t enough to save Salesforce from sounding vaguely preachy, the bulk of the brands were there to help us escape and keep us entertained. 

Crypto is making a run for the end zone. Multiple cryptocurrency brands ran spots, which had the collective effect of pushing crypto into our homes. At a time when faith in traditional institutions is at an all-time low, it’s a smart play that makes the game interesting for marketers with a different agenda. Maybe live sports should be used less for trying to sell us products we already buy, but used instead to launch new ideas into mainstream culture.

The scary aspect of this year’s commercials was how likable but unsurprising they were, as if the industry’s freshest creative felt all too familiar—well-produced but ultimately just faint echoes of past Super Bowls. Cute car ads and warm beer spots featuring a random assortment of celebrities with little-to-no authentic connections to the brands they promote.

How many will we remember in a week, and which, if any, did we share? Are the spots we saw part of a larger narrative, another episode in a series we’d binge if we could, or are they as pleasant and forgettable as a network sitcom? That’s the side of the coin we can’t see, the narrow edge between mass media and disposable advertising.

In a world of instant gratification where boredom is banished with the swipe of a thumb, we can’t just be good marketers, we have to be better entertainers.

That’s the big game we can’t afford to lose.

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