WTF, Puppy Bowl?!

Super Bowl Sunday used to be about football. And when it stopped being about football and more about promotion of products, then it became about the Puppy Bowl. Ah yes, the Puppy Bowl. That last bastion of sport that hadn’t been sucked down by the undertow of corporate greed. No longer did I have to endure giant men wearing pink Susan G. Komen gloves and cleats and pretending that they care about women getting mammograms, I could just watch puppies at play, and a kitty halftime show, all mediated by an affable referee who won our admiration in the same way an unpaid intern who is charged with picking up dog poop is. When the football was off, I could watch innocence abound.

Yes. This is the motherf**king Puppy Bowl.

Imagine then my absolute terror to see Dan Schachner, said aforementioned Puppy Bowl referee (where the hell did Andrew Schechter go?), hawking a Bissell vacuum cleaner. And it wasn’t just “hey, buy this vacuum cleaner,” it was forcibly weaved into a “narrative” of fur being left on the field. My heart broke into a thousand pieces. Covering Animal Planet Stadium (once an unfettered, uncluttered ground for pure competition - and butt sniffing) were banners for Subaru, Ice Breakers, Bissell, and scores of other corporate money hounds of the non-canine variety. I didn’t think we could sink so low - using the innocence of puppies to hawk the wares of the 1%. But there it was.

And to that point, what is Madison Avenue’s obsession with dogs? The Super Bowl ads were rife with our four-legged friends, having them fetch beers, lose weight, race with sneakers on, and even fucking murdering cats. The ads at this year’s Super Bowl reeked of mediocrity and rehash, with nary a single original idea in sight. Clint Eastwood’s Chrysler spot - considered by many as the best ad of the night - itself is a redo of the brilliant Eminem ad from a year ago, goes on waxing poetic about Detroit and American resiliency in a style reminiscent of a roided-up high school wrestling coach:

It’s a beautiful and necessary ad, but whatever legitimacy and power it held was immediately drowned out by hideously derivative GoDaddy spots and a Career Builder commercial that insinuates the American workforce is a bunch of corrupt chimpanzees.

And then we’re given the talking babies, Gen-X nostalgia and slapstick violence. Is this the best we can do? Even our European brethren - who produce the most inventive ads in the world - dumbed themselves down for the American audience by using the age-old adage that sex sells by comparing a fiery supermodel to a Fiat. A FIAT.

I was thinking this would have made an awesome ad for Rosetta Stone. Then they showed the car.

I love a good suggestive ad, but give me something out of left field. Give me something like my favorite commercial ever made, a spot for Birds Eye frozen foods that aired in England:

Instead we get Adriana Lima telling men the best way to get sex from a woman is to pay for it.

Yes, Clint Eastwood, this is what we have to offer at the halftime of our crisis. This is American ingenuity at its finest. People on Madison Avenue get paid millions of dollars to have John Stamos get head butted over a cup of yogurt. Some CEO got way too much money to greenlight an ad about Jerry Seinfeld spending glorious amounts of money - during a recession and the greatest disparity of wealth in recorded history no less - for a car that costs north of $100,000 and which won’t be available until 2015. That CEO probably relates to that commercial very, very well.

Which brings me back to the Puppy Bowl. It was just about puppies. Cute puppies. Innocent. Playing. Barking at each other. Now they’re tweeting and making a mess for a Bissell vacuum to clean up. I know, I know. Everyone’s got to make a buck. But Puppy Bowl got its astronomical ratings in the past because it had nothing to do with the corporate orgy that was the Super Bowl. It was good clean fun without an agenda except to provide counter programming. I fully understand that it is a product in and of itself, but they could probably hike up their ad revenue without plastering it with logos and working it into the main draw of the program. Even some of the toys the dogs were chewing on had corporate logos. Give us a moment to breathe, Corporate America. Let us be able to enjoy a simple concept - like a football game or puppies frolicking - without you changing the fundamental fabric of the medium itself. Sell your ads, but do it in the time it was allocated for. There is a limit to how far we can go with product placement and ads, and that line was crossed when the Puppy Bowl became an ad itself:

Oh. And congrats to the New York Football Giants. It was a hell of a game, and cheers to Ahmad Bradshaw for scoring the most adorable touchdown in football history.