Eww! A Spectacle.

We're eight months out, so I feel safe saying this now. Something weird happened to me during the Super Bowl this year. I watched the commercials and realized I didn’t give a DAMN.

Now, I don’t mean I had NO opinions. Please...I’m still me. I could tell you what was smart, beautifully made, etc. But the part of me that used to treat the Super Bowl commercial like the mountaintop of creative achievement was GONE.

That freaked me out a little! Because waaay back in ad school, I was taught to WANT the spectacle. I came up when that kind of scale was one of the clearest signals that you’d made it. So everyone wanted that SB commercial in their book.

But after spending years in-house, I fear...I saw too much lol.

When you’re close to the actual business, the work doesn’t get to float around as this beautiful object all by itself. It sits next to the customer problem and the product and the budget and the timing and the politics that come with alllll of that. The business still has to live with whatever you made after everybody else has moved on to the case study for Cannes.

THAT changed something for me.

Because I still love big, funny, weird AF work. Like, give me the gorgeous film, a CAMP production, or hell, call the celebrity IF the idea earns it. I live for a lil razzle-dazzle! But spectacle is something different.

Spectacle is when being seen becomes THEE idea. (eee-yuck)

That’s why the Super Bowl felt different to me this year. I changed. I wanted to know what was underneath all of it. What did you understand about people? Was there an idea here that would still be interesting without the budget and celebs?

The stage alone can’t be the reason the idea exists. That's backwards (as hell).

So this year, I finally figured out what had been bothering me. I’ve lost my reverence for the spectacle of the advertising machine.

Don't throw tomatoes at me.