Image credit: Dave Adamson viaUnsplash
The alternative title for this was ‘What we said to each other in the few seconds that we could speak to each other,’ because we all get to speak to each other so rarely these days. We are all in our separate WhatsApp groups, "discording" in the Discord, or DMing pretty much anywhere, I guess. But one thing’s for sure: we’re certainly rarely watching or talking about the same thing—unless it’s about sport. It is the only thing we all watch these days, which is why Sports Beach at Cannes grows exponentially year-after-year, the UFC is in talks to have a fight in front of The White House, and why the Super Bowl remains such a culturally vital moment.
Every year we have fewer blockbuster movies, fewer massive artists, and fewer of the moments we used to share. But we still have the Super Bowl. So, the most profitable institutions on Earth brief the most creative businesses on Earth to think intensively about the most compelling thing they could possibly say within sixty seconds (or six minutes, if you’re Skittles), with millions of dollars to do it. It is efficiency and storytelling at its most intentional and, supposedly, its best.
But that’s really, really difficult right now.
Storytelling is about mirroring society back at the audience through a lens that allows them to see it differently—in a way that’s more inspired, more exciting, or just more. From Beowulf to Star Wars, these are stories about characters but they’re also stories about us, and where we are, and who we are. But these ads can’t do that. As an industry, we don’t have the same creative license as filmmakers, podcast hosts, or other documentarians of our times. In other words, we can’t talk about the people being shot in the snow or the culture war taking place during the halftime show. Unless you’re working on behalf of the Epstein survivors, it’s very hard to talk about the crazy, surreal moment we’re in. Storytelling becomes almost impossible; it’s like trying to tell a joke in a burning building, which feels like a painfully accurate analogy.
All we can do is be crazy. All we can do is be surreal. All we can do is yearn for the time before "now," when things made a little more sense. How many young people do you know who have actually watched ‘Jurassic Park’? Or know who Ted Danson is? Or know that a polar bear is a mascot for Coca-Cola? We see actors digitally de-aged to make it seem like we’re still in a world where we all watch the same movies or sitcoms. But we’re not. We’re on the other side of 67. We’re post-apocalypse. We’re on the other side of the guy from crypto.com buying ai.com—and oh my God, are we really doing this again.
Yes, obviously the monoculture is dead, and I’m not trying to kick its corpse, but I think we needed the monoculture to move culture forward, that’s why fashion hasn’t changed for 20+ years and every song kind of sounds the same (Maybe I’m just getting old). But we need at least some of us looking at the same thing at the same time in order to change things. Otherwise, it’s Backstreet Boys and NSYNC cameos, ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘Friends’ spoofs all the way down. Maybe these are the last things we can remix. Maybe in 20 years, if there is still a Super Bowl on the other side of hyper entertainment, AGI or whatever happens next, those ads will just reference these ads. No one will really know where the original references came from—just that these stories, films, and ideas were once important and that they mattered because we all knew them, we’d all been with each other, watching the same thing, at the same time.
In the few seconds we had to speak to each other, when we were all watching the same thing (unless you were watching the alternative halftime show (Urgh)), we had very little of meaning to say. We just couldn’t speak. All we could do was be a little crazy, a little surreal, and isn’t that what 67 is and what it means? How else do you respond to madness but with madness? Perhaps the only message that mattered came from Levi’s—where for a few short seconds underneath their logo on the Jumbotron, a message from Bad Bunny’s halftime show appeared:
“The only thing more powerful than love is hate.”
It was brief but maybe when we were all looking, when we were all together, we all saw it.