What Super Bowl Advertisements Can Teach Us About the Civic Imagination

Co-Authored By: Maximilian Brichta, Do Own Kim, Paulina Lanz, Amanda Lee, Steven Proudfoot, Sangita Shresthova, Isabel DeLano, Molly Frizzell, Alfonso Hegde, Azeb Madebo, Ioana Mischie, Christopher Persaud, Becky Pham, Marley Randazzo, Khaliah Reed, Daisy Reid, Ingvild Kvale Sørenssen, Jessica Steel, Mythily Nair, Essence Wilson

Abstract

This article explores how Super Bowl advertisements can be used to understand and apply the authors’ concept of the “civic imagination,” which was developed in their recent books, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination (2020) and Practicing Futures (2020). They offer an analysis of selected 2022 Super Bowl ads with the goal to provide a map for educators who may be interested in exploring these, and similar media artifacts and themes with their students. They begin by laying down a foundation for civic imagination, then explore the themes that emerged through a contextual exploration of all the ads included in the 2022 lineup before diving into a close reading of two specific ads. Some surprising, yet insightful, disconnects were discovered through the process highlighting the nuanced and layered nature of the civic imagination(s).

Keywords

Civic Imagination, Popular Culture, Identity, Social Values, SuperBowl Ads

The Super Bowl is the most watched television broadcast in the United States, and its impact on American culture cannot be understated. Ever since the American Football League and National Football League merger in 1967, the Super Bowl has been the culmination of the National Football League season, where the best team in the American Football Conference faces up against the best team in the National Football Conference. In an era of declining television viewership, the Super Bowl has remained an outlier in reliably capturing a wide slice of the live TV viewing public. In addition to the football game itself, the halftime show has become a key showcase for popular musicians, including Michael Jackson (1993), Diana Ross (1996), The Rolling Stones (2006), Prince (2007), Bruce Springstein (2009), Beyonce (2013), Lady Gaga (2017), Maroon 5 (2019), Shakira and Jennifer Lopez (2020), the Weeknd (2021), and Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Eminem, and Kendrick Lamar (2022). With the halftime show considered  a marker of  artistic caliber and a springboard for reaching even broader audiences, the breadth of these examples shows the different types of performers and music that are seen as appealing to the Super Bowl market.

In addition to the popular halftime show, the Super Bowl impacts the American popular cultural imagination through advertising. Despite today’s fragmented media landscape, Super Bowl ads have  been able to attract large audiences and generate heightened dialogue on the contents of the ads across different media platforms. The Super Bowl ad slot is  one of the most expensive time slots in media and its revenue has gradually increased since its founding (McAllister & Galindo-Ramirez, 2017, p. 47). In 2022, NBC charged up to $7 Million for 30-second slots of airtime. This figure does not factor in the production budget for each commercial. Ever since the airing of Apple’s 1984 Macintosh commercial, which was shown during the big game, advertisers have followed in their footsteps, creating content that would be showcased specifically for the immense audience. Since then, the Super Bowl has become an iconic national cultural event that transcends localized broadcast boundaries bringing together otherwise largely fragmented audiences.

Major brands – especially those in the business of entertainment, snacks and fast food, cars, beers and soft drinks, computers and online platforms, and even cryptocurrency exchanges – use the Super Bowl to launch new campaigns, to make major shifts in their marketing strategies, and broaden their consumer appeal. Sometimes, these advertisements are intended for other businesses and corporations, suggesting the high commercial prestige associated with being able to secure one of these coveted slots. Super Bowl commercials are associated with soaring rhetoric and broad visions, often staking out a claim for the future, and as such, they often function as the equivalent of “the state of the union” for the private sector, describing nationally-relevant topics the industry considers salient at the time, and drawing attention to prevailing social issues. Though the Super Bowl is televised in countries around the world, the advertising has historically targeted American consumers and is still seen as a uniquely American institution, resulting in the production and performance of a particular national character. In recent years, the Super Bowl advertisements have been extensively covered by the news media, including online stories which link to and assess each ad to grasp current advertising trends more broadly. In our increasingly fragmented society, Super Bowl ads epitomize the blurring of entertainment and advertising.

All of this suggests the value of bringing Super Bowl advertisements into media literacy analysis. A timely engagement with Super Bowl ads, ideally within a few days of their broadcast, is apt to generate strong class discussion as students acquire basic skills at analyzing and critiquing media content. In this article, we will explore how Super Bowl advertisements can be used to understand and apply our concept of the “civic imagination,” which was developed in our recent books, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination (2020) and Practicing Futures (2020). In this article, we offer an analysis of selected 2022 Super Bowl ads with the goal to provide a map for educators who may be interested in exploring these, and similar media artifacts and themes with their students. We begin by laying down a foundation for our approach to the civic imagination. We then explore the themes that emerged through our contextual exploration of all the ads included in the 2022 lineup before diving into a close reading of two specific ads. Given the collective and group-work-based strategy we took, and responsibilities taken on by specific groups, some surprising, yet insightful, disconnects were discovered through the process highlighting the nuanced and layered nature of the civic imagination(s).

Civic Paths and Civic Imagination

The Civic Paths research group at the University of Southern California has been tracking the role that imagination plays in popular politics since 2009. Civic Imagination refers to our collective understanding of the relationship between people and their surrounding community and the models they draw upon to promote social change. We at Civic Paths focus on the overlapping values and the shared assumptions that tie communities together. By identifying these latent commonalities, we then seek to foster new avenues for cooperation and political engagement, which we broadly define as participation in struggles over power and resources. High school civics education tends to limit what we can imagine as forms of civic engagement by exclusively regrading it as participation in government processes. However, young people around the world are promoting alternative social visions and deploying a vernacular drawn from popular culture to foster the civic imagination. Pop cultural productions are apt for cultivating civic imagination because they are not necessarily imbued with partisan positions but are in effect bridging cultural capital that may allow different kinds of communication to emerge between participants.

Certainly one can find forms of popular culture which appeal primarily to one ideological faction or another. For example, researchers have documented how Nordic and Germanic imagery appeals to the far right, including many white supremacist groups, who have been among the first to develop memes around recent films such as The Northman (2022) or shout outs to the “Red Wedding” [a reference to a specific bloody masacre on Game of Thrones (Benioff, D. & Weiss, D.B. et al., 2013)] deployed by Alt-Right podcasters in advance of the January 6, 2021 upheaval. But more often, the meanings associated with popular culture references are up for grabs and groups with fundamentally different political goals may draw inspiration from fictional universes, such as that of superheroes. Popular culture texts can be remixed, remobilized, and reperformed as mechanisms for staging civic and political debates.

The relationship between the civic and the political is complicated. For instance, the shared values expressed through the civic are what we draw upon to heal following the intense partisan struggles surrounding an election. We accept the results of elections in part based on the mutual trust generated by civic relations amongst neighbors. But in recent years, we have seen increased polarization in American politics, partially as a result of prolonged electoral campaigns, the use of wedge issues to drive participation, and the deployment of disinformation and misinformation tactics to sow doubts about election outcomes. These tactics have made it more difficult for the country to heal in the aftermath of a campaign. We are burning through the goodwill the civic offers without bringing about any reconciliation between warring parties. We speak past each other without really hearing each other’s concerns. To bridge this partisan divide, notable US-based nonprofit organizations such as Braver Angels, a U.S. grassroots cross-partisan nonprofit dedicated to advancing political depolarization, and Weave: The Social Fabric Project, a nonprofit that addresses a crisis of connection in the U.S. and aims to build social trust, are encouraging more dialogue between the Right and the Left founded on greater curiosity about what we each believe and why. While these organizations deploy a range of cultural techniques to encourage reflection and participation, bridging ideological divides, a focus on popular media has been a hallmark of our approach to the civic imagination.

The civic imagination serves a range of key functions in bridging divisions and forging points of connection. First and foremost, before we can build a better future, we need to imagine what a better world looks like. We need to imagine ourselves as civic agents capable of making change. We need to come together as imagining communities as we articulate our shared hopes, fears, and aspirations. We need to imagine new levers of change that may effectively achieve our goals. We need to identify points of contact with groups whose experiences and perspectives are radically different from our own. As writers in the radical Black imagination tradition tell us, those who are most marginalized and oppressed may need to imagine freedom, respect, and democracy before they have directly experienced them. We argue that imagining together is a collective task that helps reconcile those differences. Finally, civic imagination may charge everyday spaces and rituals with democratic potentials and civic meanings: the struggles taking place right now around public monuments illustrate how intensely people struggle around issues of popular memory and imagination in regard to particularly charged spaces. The following sections propose a media literacy activity that aims to connect the civic imagination to a widely viewed and culturally momentous media event, Super Bowl commercials.

Analyzing Super Bowl Advertisements: A Media Literacy Activity

This project starts from the premise that Super Bowl advertisements may offer a vibrant window into the American civic imagination at the current moment. They are rarely overtly political in the partisan sense because advertisers do not want to alienate consumers on any point along the ideological spectrum. However, they are often civic, encouraging us to work together around common desires and interests. They often make statements about America and its place in the world, which help to direct enthusiasm behind the brands and services being promoted. Additionally, many of today’s ads are designed to inspire memes, since popular circulation of their messages will remind consumers of their products, and these memes may be connected to various causes in ways that rearticulate their messages. Super Bowl ads inspire spreadable media practices, and thus, through netnographic research methods, one can study what groups rally around them, what meanings they attach to catchphrases and iconography, and what causes they get directed towards. We would argue that being able to trace the circulation and deployment of these ads as resources for the civic imagination represents a core media literacy skill in the 21st century.

Media Literacy educators have long held classroom discussions dissecting advertisements. Historically, the Media Literacy movement has centered such conversations around a shared agenda of basic questions:

• Who created this message?
• What techniques are used to attract my attention?
• How might people understand this message differently?
• What lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message?
• Why was this message sent?

We want to model how such discussions can gain new immediacy by adding the concept of the civic imagination to our consideration of these media materials, their goals, intended audiences, meanings, and effects. Here we would bring an additional set of questions:

• What do you think the message of the advertisement is? How is this message told and by whom? To whom? Is this ad straight to consumer or business-to-business?
• Would this ad be considered “controversial?” How is this ad political or not political?
• How would people with different interests/perspectives/experiences react to this ad?
• Does the ad include a call to action and how inclusive is this invitation?
• What do you think are some of the conversations that the ad’s creative team would have had? If you were on the team, what would you have said? Would the ad look different?
• What civic assumptions does the ad make? What does it explicitly or implicitly say about the state of the world? The nature of American life?
• How does this ad compare to past Super Bowl ad(s), or other advertisements with a similar product/service or message?
• How does the advertisement evoke other forms of popular culture? What celebrity spokespeople are deployed, for example, and why?

Some of these questions will be more challenging than others, depending on your participants’ grade levels. We see this activity as ideally suited for high school and university students, though it might be adopted for use at a middle school level.

The Civic Paths team worked with a sample of advertisements from the 2022 Super Bowl, which pitted the Cincinnati Bengals against the Los Angeles Rams, and had  a halftime show lineup featuring Mary J. Blige, Lamar Kendrick, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dog, and 50 Cent. We looked at an extensive selection of the 2022 crop of Super Bowl commercials (Ad Age, 2022). In what follows, we will model two modes of analysis. The first takes a comparative look across the full spectrum of commercials to identify recurring themes and thus create a synthesis of the civic imagination at a specific moment. The second looks more closely at specific advertisements to see how they model the civic and how they might be responding to contemporary political realities. We hope to inspire more teachers to work through the 2023 Super Bowl advertisements with their students, applying similar methods and asking their own questions about the civic visions, implicit and sometimes explicit, in their messages. We assume that advertisements do not simply sell products but tap into (and amplify) shared understandings of the world.

We divided an initial sample of advertisements (Schonenberger, 2022) into the following clusters. Links for each advertisement are provided below:

A: The New Frontier (Salesforce, 2022); Willie Nelson for Skechers – “Legalize” Big Game commercial (Skechers, 2022)

B: PLANTERS Deluxe Mixed Nuts – “Feed The Debate” (Mr. Peanut, 2022); Lizzo in Real Tone #SeenOnPixel (Made by Google, 2022)

C: Avocados From Mexico – Big Game Commercial 2022 – #AlwaysGood :30 (Avocados From Mexico, 2022, February 8); Pangea | Official Film – Turkish Airlines (Turkish Airlines, 2022). February 10).

Team members were also invited to do a more thorough review of other advertisements for this or prior Super Bowls as they sought to place their initial observations into a larger context.  From this process, we identified two approaches to deepening our analysis. On the one hand, we wanted to map some larger themes and trends which emerged across multiple ads, looking for a big picture understanding of how the Super Bowl advertisements gave us a sample of the American “civic imagination” as it operated in early 2022. On the other, we decided to identify two ads to drill down into more deeply to understand specific campaigns, the choices made, and why and how these decisions locate these brands in relation to civic life by activating civic imagination.

Analyzing Larger Trends

Team members analyzing larger trends watched all the ads included in the 2022 lineup. They then discussed the ads and worked together to identify recurring themes that surfaced when the ads were viewed as a collection. Here are their observations:

Technological Literacy

Alongside their purpose of promoting consumer spending, Super Bowl ads can arguably function as an educational tool for media literacy since they provide an opportunity to expose and teach viewers the persuasive techniques of contemporary advertising. A notable motif observed thus far in some of the ads is a combination of both protectionist and empowering messages, especially when technology products are involved. The promoted technology is typically portrayed as being better at solving problems or harms caused by other, competing, products while also claiming to empower consumers to be included in the latest technological movement and reap the benefits of desirable technological advancements for the betterment of their daily life. 

Amazon pushes the idea of adaptive AI. When real-life married celebrities Colin Jost and Scarlett Johansson (amazon, 2022) suggest that “it’s almost as if Alexa can read your mind,” they trigger a series of comic vignettes, showing Alexa saying aloud or providing services that inappropriately reflect what they are thinking, such as providing mouthwash when they wake up in bed together or revealing to dinner guest that Johansson bought her allegedly home-made bread at Whole Foods (incidentally, another Amazon-owned brand). Here, we are encouraged to be skeptical of the promise that technologies can fix all our problems even as we are reminded how quickly technologies adapt to service human needs. 

T-Mobile (2022) similarly encourages a certain degree of playful skepticism about other advertisers’ practices – in this case, the cliches of the public service spot. Dolly Parton explains, “When I see a problem, I am going to fix it. America’s got a serious problem, so I am going to get it off my chest,” before revealing that she is describing gaps in access to 5-G phones. She promises us “you can make a difference” and urges Miley Cyrus, “you’ve got a voice. Use it!” to spread the word – “do it for the phones!” Here and in other advertisements for technology-related products, better communication is seen as a tool for building a better world, even if the companies seem to want to tamp down the bold promises of the digital revolution in favor of more playful visions of how these tools and platforms might fit in our everyday lives.

Sustainability

Brands and products are responding to a rise in climate change awareness and enthusiasm for making more sustainable lifestyle choices in a variety of ways. The most prominent is when brands present their product as necessary for a more sustainable life, which seems to be a conscious consumer choice. For example, a Salesforce (2022) advertisement, intended to spoof the lofty visions of billionaires such as Elon Musk, starts in space but gradually brings us back down to Earth as Matthew McConaughy explains, “It’s not time to escape. It’s time to engage. It’s time to plant more trees. It’s time to build more trust. It’s time to make more space for all of us. So while the others look to the Metaverse and Mars, let’s stay here and restore Earth.” In practice, the advertisement does little to directly link its service to any specific action which might improve life on Earth. 

The term greenwashing is frequently applied to corporate practices that seek to embrace public interests in sustainability without making significant contributions to our understanding of these issues or addressing the actual problems associated with climate change. Polestar (2022) called out other Super Bowl advertisements with a minimalist ad for their one-hundred percent electric car, promising, among other things, “No Dieselgate. No dirty secrets. No hidden agenda…No conquering Mars…No greenwashing.” 

Such messages create a disconnect because advertisements like Kia’s electric car (Kia America, 2022) push the viewer to buy the product to lead a sustainable life instead of using existing resources more sustainably. Interestingly, we never see brands promote ways for people to participate in sustainable consumerism as a community activity. Hellmann Mayonnaise (Hellmann’s, 2022), for example, deployed Linebacker Jerod Mayo to literally “tackle food waste,” suggesting ways that leftovers could be recycled into new dishes through  their products. The actions here are individualized and immediate, as one might expect from companies that shy away from a larger vision of environmental justice and do not endorse specific policies such as the Green New Deal.

Nostalgia

Super Bowl 2022 ads often evoked nostalgia for an idealized world before – before the pandemic, before the lockdown, before the exacerbated polarization, before environmental disaster – as an escape from the sense of dread and claustrophobia that many were feeling. Nostalgia can be understood as a form of utopian imagination where alternatives to current problems are projected onto the past rather than the future (Boym, 2002). General Motors (2022) brought back Mike Myers as Dr. Evil from the 1990s Austin Powers franchise as he continues to plan a global take-over, but first wants to reduce his organization’s carbon footprint. Chevrolet (2022) restages the opening sequence from The Sopranos, showing their car driving the New Jersey turnpike, though in the end, it is Meadow and A.J. who is driving the car, not Tony Soprano, representing a new generation of mob leaders, and the car itself is now an electric vehicle.

Many of the chosen celebrities are established figures (such as Morgan Freeman (Turkish Airlines, 2022), Larry David (FTX Official, 2022), Salma Hayek and Arnold Schwarzenegger (BMW, 2022), rather than trendy or edgy performers, stars whom we associate with earlier and better times.

Spoofing such nostalgic tendencies, Lays (2022) brought together Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen, real-world friends who have appeared together in such buddy comedies as Anchorman, This is the End, Knocked Up, and Sausage Party. Sitting on the steps of a church, as Rogen awaits a wedding, they suggest that Lays potato chips, “brings back so many memories….” Some of the memories are indeed fond (a “road trip in ‘97’), where-as others imply the past was not nearly as “golden” as we like to imagine, showing everything from airplane crashes and kidnappings to a zombie apocalypse. Bad times, it suggests, become good times when shared with friends and chips. A commercial for Avocados from Mexico, which we will analyze below, shares a similar sentiment: food is a means of communion.

For advertisers themselves, the Super Bowl could be said to provoke nostalgia for a pre-digital era, where mass-market advertising could command focused attention as contrasted with the fragmentation and dispersion of our current moment of digitally mediated communication. In many ways, the Super Bowl ads want a return to the familiar, the comfortable, and the past, even as companies suggest ways that their products are exceptional, blending past and future while speaking around the current moment.

Diversity / Representation

Brands and products advertising during the 2022 Super Bowl  were diverse in their representation of underrepresented populations. Gillette (2022), for example, showcases its razor’s featuring a Latino male. Toyota (2022) tells a story of an athlete with macular degeneration “triumphing” over disability.” 

However, their advertisements are limited to targeting the product rather than addressing the needs of underrepresented groups. For example, Lizzo’s spot for Google Pixel (2022) discussed themes of technological racism – the idea that tech products are designed with white consumers in mind and thus may have “unintentional” and adverse effects when used by consumers of color, underscored by the statement: “Historically camera technology hasn’t accurately represented darker skin tones.”  While Lizzo is foregrounded, everyday Black folks share their experiences. One of the folks featured in the ad laments, “Every yearbook photo of mine has been terribly shot since I was a kid…I always show up as too dark or too shiny,” sharing the bad results they have had with photography. Here, the promise is that the Pixel camera’s “real tone” feature may more reliably capture the pigmentation of Black consumers, addressing a long-standing source of concern: “Everybody deserves to be seen as they really are.” Considerable debate has centered around the commercial’s own range of skin tone and complexion in its casting decisions, as well as the question of how far a product can go in addressing racism.

These short analyses of clusters of commercials do not fully exhaust the range of themes or the ways that these advertisements stake out positions on some of the core issues – the environment, technological change, racism – of the current moment. Nevertheless, they suggest the limits of how such concerns can be addressed through advertising. Brands ultimately can deflect criticism of deeper social inequalities,the capitalist system itself, and the ways that the answer to most of these problems boil down to less consumerism and less profit-driven business models. Problems are introduced so that their products might promise magical solutions. But we want to make sure that these discussions deal with the multiple levels that these advertisements might offer a snapshot into different visions of America – the concerns raised, the values expressed, and the visions of social change imagined.

In addition to our thematic discussion of the 2022 Super Bowl ads, we also conducted close readings of two ads that fell outside the four themes. We selected two ads on which we could also do a closer reading in order to see how the brands connect to the civic imagination, and in what ways the narratives seek to inspire collective action and their connection to social life. The deeper analysis also allowed us to delve into the tensions from within and to find their brand-based and storyline connection to the larger social scope.

Reading Individual Ads

PLANTERS Deluxe Mixed Nuts – “Feed The Debate” (:60) (2022), by Mr. Peanut

Amidst an era of heightened polarization in American political life, this Planters commercial depicts the nation being divided into shouting matches and protests in the street over the minor issue of how different Americans eat their mixed nuts. The ad opens to Ken Jeong and Joel McHale eating peanuts at a bar with many tables in the back populated with men sitting in pairs of two. The two celebrities debate whether it is normal to eat Planters Peanuts one at a time or several at once in a handful. Unable to agree, they decide to settle the argument by posing the question to Twitter. As the tweet goes out, the camera shifts to the other customers sitting throughout the bar. The other customers begin to disagree with each other. After the disagreements emerge, dramatic music plays as the various pairs bicker over the topic. Notably, all but one are male, and the one female makes a comment evoking a domestic argument: “can you make any decisions?” Eventually, the entire bar erupts, with patrons yelling at one another. The music grows louder as it shows the news on one of the bar’s televisions, which is covering a nationwide disturbance over how to eat mixed nuts.

Notably, the scene shares the typical indicators of protests, but also the bodypaint and signs of fannish cheering in sports arenas. People hold signs saying either “all” or “one,” with one male displaying “all” painted on his back. Framing the protest through sports symbolism, the ad avoids making direct claims about contemporary political issues and protests within the United States.  When the camera returns to Joel McHale and Ken Jeong, McHale wryly asks  “Who knew America would tear itself apart over a relatively minor difference of opinion?” The ad then cuts to a product shot with a direct call to action for viewers to also voice their opinion on the “delicious debate” on Twitter. Here, we see one of the most overt attempts to use the Super Bowl to encourage user participation and dissemination, positioning virality as a measure of advertising success. However, the commercial’s comic frame suggests the real risks of directing people toward social media, constructing a dangerous cycle where the wrong tweet can spark protests which get amplified by the news yielding new tweets and more disagreements. Furthermore, the ad critiques mainstream news coverage by showing how, from the perspective of the news camera, there appears to be a massive, rowdy protest, whereas in reality, there is only a handful of people demonstrating. This incongruity of perspective shows how news stories can become amplified as media spectacles by focusing on sensational images and dramatic reporting.

“A Delicious Debate,” sends the message that even innocuous issues such as methods of eating mixed nuts can divide the nation and initiate conflict. Though termed a debate, the commercial only shows shouting matches and protests with no real dialogue between sides. This parody of political polarization recalls Jonathon Swift’s representation of a war which erupts over how one eats eggs in Gulliver’s Travels. This advertisement offers an incredibly cynical depiction of what it sees as the state of American political discourse, turning everyday consumption of snack foods into a wedge issue in an ongoing culture war. Additionally, it satirizes the extreme polarization in American political life by implicitly suggesting that people get riled up over the most minor disagreements, mere “peanuts.”

Avocados From Mexico – Big Game Commercial 2022 – #AlwaysGood :30 (2022), Avocados From Mexico.

Taking an opposite route to the Planters ad, the  Avocados from Mexico ad shows how divisions can be bridged as long as there is something good over which to bond. The commercial begins at an ancient Roman tailgate party for a “big game” between Romans and Barbarians, who are visually and behaviorally distinct. At the outset, the Romans behave reserved and civilized next to the raucous and destructive Barbarians.

Dialogue begins with both sides bickering at one another: the Romans complain about the Barbarians’ presence as we see one smashing a table while partying. The Barbarians respond that they traveled for multiple days to make it for the game, introducing a layer of geographic distinction and spatial difference. One could read this focus on migration and cultural difference as hinting at the intense debates over immigration policy and Trump’s rhetorical attacks on Mexico.

At this contentious point, one of the Barbarians introduces avocados and asks the Romans if they would like to share. As the seemingly uncivilized Barbarians are at the party to introduce avocados, this plot point plays with perceptions of societal development and could be interpreted as commenting on prejudice towards Mexicans being less refined.

After avocados are introduced, a true party begins when both sides mix and are equally ebullient. Tensions evaporate over shared food, accentuated by loud and typically masculine tailgate behavior. Social, political, and cultural distinctions are collapsed via avocados. After a number of party moments, Andy Richter, playing an irreverent Caesar underscores the precarity of a democratic-republican system based on the social cohesion of disparate cultural, ethnic, and geographic groups. Sports (this is a tailgate, after all) can only work in advanced social and political systems that can absorb meaningful conflict.

Notably, the U.S. suspended Mexican avocado imports the night of the Super Bowl due to a range of concerns: potential involvement of the drug cartel, which threatened the security of inspection officers, and of U.S. avocado growers’ concerns over the spread of plant diseases that might threaten their crops. An official statement released by the United States Government explained on February 13th, 2022 that, “facilitating the export of Mexican avocados to the U.S. and guaranteeing the safety of our agricultural inspection personnel go hand in hand. We are working with the Mexican government to guarantee security conditions that would allow our personnel in Michoacan to resume operations”. In reality, Avocados from Mexico can be very divisive, pointing to tensions between two countries, and the advertisement represented a lobbying effort to shift public policy, not simply a funny celebration of how disparate groups might get along better over their common appreciation for avocados.

While peanuts and the different ways people consume them are framed as the start of an argument, avocados are framed as a universal uniting force against political,social, and spatial divides. Large public and corporate entities (like The Avocados from Mexico lobbying group, parent Omnicom Group, NBC Universal and Comcast, etc.)  engage contemporary civic conflicts and channel tensions into a tailgate party. In their imagining, individual and factional identities are deftly overcome through literal consumption. Both advertisements suggest the perceived precariousness of the current social order, where minor differences can escalate into unrest, and that good food and good times can be the source of social cohesion or dissonance.

The persistence of these themes across a range of ads suggests the extent that advertisers think Americans are concerned about cultural divides and the polarization of American political life. We may debate how important the issues dividing us are, whether they are as trivial as how we eat nuts or fundamental to our sense of justice, equality, and democracy. However,advertisements can only dig so deep and push these arguments so far, since identity is defined by consumption of certain products. Reading across these two ads, one might almost quip: if you eat avocados, then we can find common ground, but if you eat your peanuts one at a time, forget it!

Both also exploit the Super Bowl context, using images associated with football (tailgate party, body paint, etc.) as they represent what are fundamentally civic processes. Sports as a competition represents a tamer version of conflict between different civic organizations (Cincinnati and Los Angeles happen to be in Red and Blue states, respectively), where our emotions are channeled, intensified, and resolved over the course of the game.  Serious political debates are staged through the snacks that sports fans consume during the big game, again, a consumerist frame that reflects the limits of the civic imagination as it can be represented through commercial discourse. Again, it is worth asking what other potential and more public-spirited solutions to these divides might look like, and where the stories and images that might inspire their resolution will come from.

Reflections

Thinking about the Civic Imagination invites us to consider how we understand how we live together and how we connect with civics and politics.  It asks us to think about questions of identity, agency, process, and change; about the worlds we would like to inhabit in the future and the realities we confront in the present.  These advertisements suggest the limits of a commercial frame for addressing these issues, but they also give us a snapshot of the underlying clash of values that define our current civic context. Each brand offers us a vision of the world – often with a problem-solution frame that tries to suggest the world as it is now and some ideal world that the brand might help us to achieve. The Planters commercial is, of course, an exception to this frame, given that the scene begins with friends bantering and devolving into polarized animosity by the end of the scene, reflecting the unfortunate reality of politics driving a wedge in close relationships. These advertisements need to appeal to the existing beliefs and underlying emotional needs of their potential consumers in order to be effective as marketing.

And as such, they can be understood as mirroring something that is really taking place in the lives of dominant groups. And yet,  while the ads target issues that are relevant to dominant groups, they can also make claims in support of underrepresented groups while attempting to not alienate the dominant groups in the process. Concerns about environmental damage are unavoidable as the signs of climate change appear regularly on the news. There is increasing skepticism about whether new technologies are making our lives better or worse and, more generally, whether products are serving our needs or we are being taught to have new needs Black people do feel frustration over the ways that cameras are designed to better meet the needs of white users than their own. Americans are worried about the volatility of political debates and what people may bring with them when they cross our borders. Often, these advertisements adopt a comic or ironic tone, but not all of them do so.

Many of the members of our team were earnestly moved by a Turkish Airlines spot. Morgan Freeman, so often the voice of God in American popular culture, asks us to imagine a time when “there was no Africa, Asias, Americas or Europe. Just one big supercontinent. Pangea.” Using this whole world vision, the advertisement promoted travel as “a force connecting those divided by distance….Making far seem close.” Here, the imagery showed rifts being closed as the continents are fit back together again and the camera pulls back to show one big, blue world, floating in the vastness of space and family members hugging each other. Such an appeal to the healing potentials of travel packed a wallop for many of us, given the number of international students in our group who had not been able to travel home and others who had not been able to see their families during the pandemic.

We can understand the power of such a message in today’s political climate, all the more so when we factor in various global conflicts, including the festering relations at that point between Russia and Ukraine, not to mention the rise of autocratic regimes in many countries (including, ironically, Turkey). Yet, we also need to be skeptical about how those feelings were being stroked to encourage one consumerist option over another. An advertisement can provoke more than one feeling at a time and it might also serve more than one cause, but the commercial frame sets limits on our civic imaginations. Media literacy offers us the best tools for understanding what those limits are. Widely viewed pop culture productions, such as Super Bowl commercials, offer us neutral grounds to creatively discuss some of the most complicated and contentious social issues of our time.

Works Cited

Ad Age. (2022, August 29). Watch all the Super Bowl 2022 commercials. https://adage.com/SuperBowl2022Commercials

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