Last night’s Super Bowl had a little bit of everything. Brother versus brother. The final game of a controversial league legend. Defensive domination. Offensive power. A stunning comeback. A risky checkdown from run to pass on third and short that may have won the game. A controversial non-call at the end. An electrical blackout, or near enough, that stopped the game for 34 minutes and gave the dying 49ers a chance to get up off the mat. They almost took full advantage of that.
The ads were mostly forgettable. A few were R-rated, a sign that advertisers have either forgotten that families watch the game together, or that they just don’t care that families watch the game together. A few were funny. Several used massive special effects to get their point across.
And then Dodge shows up with this ad.
“So God made a farmer” was in every way an act of rebellion against the ethos of Super Bowl ads and against the culture of the big game. While most ads go for a joke, this one goes for a sermon. While most push the effects to the limit, this one uses almost nothing but slides. While most use sex, this one uses hard work. Against the glitz of big time sports, Dodge gave us dirt. Against the beauty of super models, Dodge gave us wrinkles on sun-beaten faces, and a photo of a family at prayer.
It was the most countercultural ad of the night, on a night when even the MVP QB couldn’t keep it clean.
And for all of that, it was easily the most perfect and greatest ad of the night.
Congrats to the Ravens. But thank you, to Dodge. Paul Harvey, for the win.
You might want to send that one back through the formatting machine. On my machine with Chrome, the video shows up overtop of the bottom paragraph.
best ad of the night in my book
Was that halftime show a singer pretending to be a pole dancer, or a pole dancer pretending to be a singer? bleah.
PaulS
What a breath of fresh air.
God bless America.
Best ad.
There was also the one car commercial where a kid asks “where do babies come from?” And the answer given was, implicitly, Heaven.
” A few were R-rated”
They were? Which ones? And how?
The one with the guy who wakes up in a strange apartment, with bondage handcuffs and other paraphernalia around, the Bar Rafaeli ad, the Two Broke Girls ad where they strip down and do a pole dance, do I really need to waste time making this case?
Wow !
Truly excellent.
Now imagine what would happen if the television were always used to spread serious reflections instead of serious garbage.
Great ad, Paul Harvey tells it like it is, another classic appeared on many blogs last year, “If I were the devil”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3Az0okaHig
As Yogi would say “It’s deja vu all over again”
– asked in a speech to farmers (with his accent, of course), “What’s wrong with American farmers today?!”
A farmer shouted back, “They’re staaaaarving!!”
Must add that the ad was also sponsored by the National FFA.
I thought it was a pretty interesting that the 3 best ads last night emphasized the foundations of American values and greatness with the sponsor staying in the background:
Paul Harvey, National FFA and Dodge – the American Farmer
Budweisers’ Clydesdale Ad
Jeeps and USO for the American Soldier
Hmm, all in service of a company that makes craptastic cars so poorly and so expensively that they needed billions of taxpayer dollars just to keep from going down the toilet, billions we’ll never see again.
Chrysler and GM: union benefits companies that make (crappy) cars on the side.
We had a good sized crowd during the game, with a lot of crosstalk during all the other commercials. But when this one came on, the room went silent in about 3 seconds.
Maybe no one in my house is necessarily in the market for a Dodge truck, but we sure remembered that commercial.
Dodge no longer makes trucks. Chrysler separated out its truck line to a new division, Ram.
Excellent. We did not view the Super Bowl at our house, but that Paul Harvey recording is definitely a W I N.
I wouldn’t buy a government-owned Dodge to save my life, but that ad was quite possibly the most surprising thing I’ve ever seen on TV. It was a simple and direct rebuke of almost everything that’s wrong with modern American culture.
Chrysler didn’t build that, Paul Harvey did.
“..and now for the rest of the story…”