The Super Bowl of Advertising - A Book Review

Every year, millions of people crowd around the television to watch the biggest event in the football season unfold right before their eyes. Sides are taken and cheering for the favorite teams fire up, making Super Bowl Sunday one of the most anticipated events among fans. While Super Bowl revolves around football, the game at hand is not the only feature about the event that everyone looks forward to. In between the touchdowns, timeouts and first-downs, the most significant time in the entire year for the advertising industry is taking place.

Unfolding before millions of potential consumers, Super Bowl advertisements are a huge step from a traditional spot on primetime. So many people have high expectations on Super Bowl advertisements, placing the fate of an entire company in the hands of the creative services department as they attempt to create the most original, most eye-catching, and most effective advertisement of all time. Therefore, the Super Bowl not only means stress on the head coaches, quarterbacks, and referees. The Super Bowl also means tremendous stress on the people behind the commercials that we sit back and enjoy on the big game day.

The book which dissects the advertising aspect of the Super Bowl is called The Super Bowl of Advertising by Bernice Kanner. In this book, Kanner recalls some of the most memorable advertisements in the history of this football finale from Super Bowl I in 1967, all the way to Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004. She touches on what television stations have charged throughout the years for a spot in the show, the strategic mindset various companies have when developing an advertisement campaign, which campaigns were a touchdown success, and which campaigns were flagged as total flops.

One of the tendencies this book leaned toward was focusing on the specific trends that Super Bowl advertisements have followed in history. I feel that the author did a very effective job in avoiding the temptation from making this entire book just full of a bunch of advertisement examples. Instead, Kanner separated the book into three main sections so that readers can easily navigate to any category of interest to analyze how various markets have gone about their campaigns.

The first section in the book is the big picture, which breaks down the Super Bowl advertisements into the respective decade in which they appeared. The second section is the various arenas or categories that have proven to be the most prominent throughout Super Bowl history considering the primary target audience are men. Finally, the third section targets the most recent Super Bowl’s and the innovations involved in advertisement development, causing them to become more innovative with the changing times.

One benefit I received from this book is how screenshots from real-life commercials are present in abundance throughout the entire book. These pictures and illustrations greatly enhance the point the author is attempting to portray and also aids the reader in visualizing the trends described on each page. While these screenshots were helpful and enhancing, I did have a shortcoming that distracted me on more than one occasion. In some instances, the part of the text that describes a commercial that ran in the Super Bowl did not align with its corresponding pictorial example. After reading about an ad, I would have to turn the page before I saw the picture. The picture would be even positioned next to another completely unrelated commercial. I never had consistency, which led to a few confusing moments.

Despite the shortcomings, this book provides a reader with a tremendous knowledge and understanding of how advertisements seen on the Super Bowl are developed, and executed. I have benefited personally from having a greater appreciation to the work and cost involved in producing an advertisement. One thing I learned from reading this book was how disappointing it can be for a company to produce an advertisement, and then have it receive the label of ineffective, and a failure. Due to the work and cost involved in putting it all together, a failed result has the gut-wrenching disappointment comparable to a well-trained Olympic athlete missing a medal by an extremely close call.

After reading this book I anticipate future Super Bowl contests in which I will be paying much closer attention to what transpires with a better knowledge of the goals a company desires to reach through their persuading message.

The author, Bernice Kanner, is an expert in the marketing field. This book The Super Bowl of Advertising is not the first time that she has taken a detailed look at advertising and marketing. She has a weekly column in the New York Magazine in which she analyzes the latest trends in marketing. She is no stranger to television as she has appeared on many shows such as Oprah, Dateline, and The Today Show. To top it off, one of her greatest accomplishments was winning the Saatchi and Saatchi Annual Journalism Award three times. So if anybody is more credible to explain about the world of marketing and advertising, it would have to be Bernice Kanner.