As the biting of nails turns into the crashing of beer cans, the Philadelphia Eagles ended the Patriots final offensive drive. Amid the celebrations, I hear people mumbling “I only came for the commercials and halftime show”. For the millions of dollars spend on the 30 second time frame, these commercials have become the strongest form of media literacy that usually include humor and remain within the time constraints. With most ads being for Doritos, Bud Light, or the newest 2019 Lexus, the use of media literacy has become one of the most important parts of planning a new Super Bowl ad. But what is it about a guy getting hit with a rock while playing Rock-Paper-Scissors that makes us crave the Budweiser that was in his other hand? These marketing and creative teams are trained not only in art theory and current social awareness, but understanding current literacy trends can be an advantage to targeting a certain audience. For example, as women have become more literate and left the traditional stay-at-home-mom jobs to broke high school nannies, advertisements have been shifting their platform from trying to attract viewers with fart jokes and guys getting hit in the groin to a group of husbands being shown up by a wife. Like the current social change of empowering women, media literacy has shown itself to be one of the most important forms of literacy in the 21st century to inspire new ideas and change–especially when the Patriots don’t come back in the 4th quarter.
Your piece reminds me of the conversations in class regarding how computer literacy is in fact a real thing, a real source of knowledge that people might disregard as trivial. As stated above, marketing teams must be fluent in various types of literacies and if there are gaps in this knowledge, then it shows in their work. I think that they ways in which they employ their skills at manipulating viewers has only increased, as we have more and more work being put into their finished products. Commercials have teams of people working on them so that they appeal to the correct demographic, often so that the target audience’s literacy is in mind and exploited as much as it can. In the end, I think that increased literacy has to led to more knowledge but more chances for people to use it however they’d like.
I was definitely among the ambivalent set that just wanted to see the good commercials and cringe at Justin Timberlake.
While I think most people are aware that there’s a lot that goes behind making those commercials, I doubt anyone outside of the industry really understands the full scope. The phrase, “If it’s not new it’s old” applies readily to television media. It kind of reminds me of the movie “Idiocracy” where top minds are put to creating penis enlargement drugs (and probably commercials) instead of, ya know, curing cancer.
Society just doesn’t have enough time to consume text, but as Brandt points out we’re still being trained in literacy by Anheuser-Busch so that they can get us to crack open that cold, cold Bud Light.