WE’VE COME A LONG WAY SINCE “MEAN JOE”

Super Bowl commercials fall foul of Janet Jackson factor
(David Litterick, The Telegraph, February 4th, 2005)

The new moral Puritanism inspired by Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at last year's Super Bowl football championship, when the singer bared her breast, means the most interesting adverts this year are the ones viewers won't be able to see.

Competition for the 30-second advertising slots is fierce, with companies paying up to $2.4m for the privilege of reaching up to 145m viewers during this Sunday's showdown – twice as much as a decade ago.

In recent years Super Bowl sponsors have sought to create a stir – winning millions of dollars of free publicity in the process. But this year Madison Avenue, where most of New York's advertising agencies are based, has become increasingly sensitive to criticism, particularly after previous Super Bowl ads depicting a flatulent horse and a crotch-biting dog were dismissed as vulgar.

Budweiser's brewer Anheuser Busch has pulled an ad that poked fun at last year's half-time show, while cold remedy Airborne, which had planned an ad featuring a few seconds of 84-year-old Mickey Rooney's bottom, fell foul of the National Football League and Fox, the network that carries the game.

The soi-disant cultural elites are having some grand old guffaws with this one, some of them half-amusing. Unfortunately, their smugness keeps them from asking themselves how they ever regressed to the point where they think a flatulent horse, a crotch-biting dog or Mickey Rooney’s naked bum are clever or interesting.