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Super Bowl ads

 





This year, the Super Bowl featured a match-up between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco Forty-Niners.  I'll discuss that tomorrow.  Today, I'd like to say a few words about the ads, which have long been a hallmark of the Super Bowl as entertainment and pop cultural event.

The Super Bowl is guaranteed a massive audience, and the ads are expensively created with that audience in mind, at a cost of about $7 million per second of air time. That isn't what the ads cost to produce, ut is only the cost of airing them. Production costs of course vary wildly but there is no reason to try to cut corners on this. 

This year what stands out in my minds were ads for Homes.com and Apartment.com., featuring Jeff Goldblum and  Dan Levy.  I think of them as ONE series of ads because the two websites they advertise are both parts of the portfolio of CoStar group. 

Of course Goldblum -- famous among much else for his park in the Jurassic Park franchise -- has long been the celebrity face of apartments.com.  Dan Levy seems to have stepped up to play an analogous role for Homes.com. Dan Levy is the son of Eugene Levy, and both were made famous (or, in the father's case, his fame was revived) by Schitt's Creek.  

In at least one of the ads, both Dan Levy and Goldblum appeared. Levy walked into what looked like a boardroom in a skyscraper -- the sort of boardroom one remembers from Hudsucker Proxy. Dan walked in and announced that his uncle has died, leaving him in charge of the company. He describes his vision for the company, which involves the phrase "we've done your home work." The board members look appalled. Goldblum, though, looks unfazed, and says in essence, 'I get it -- and I like what you did there.'

We may have witnessed a passing-of-the-torch moment. 

I have to admit that I was nonplussed by the only blatant political ad of the program: a plug for the independent campaign of RFK Jr.  It looked like a lot of 1960 era black-and-white footage into which the latest Kennedy to be running for President had spliced his likeness. 

Tacky.  But these are the times in which we live. 

As promised, something about the game tomorrow.    

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