 If you're anything like me, you watch the Super Bowl for a number of reasons, and sometimes none of those are football. Whether you watch for the halftime show, for the commercials, or for the actual game, something I always look forward to every year, even when I don't necessarily care about the game itself. I'm not really a big football fan myself. But the commercials are always entertaining for various reasons, either they're really good or really, really bad. America, how do you watch? Well I did not see all of them this time around. I can definitely tell you that it seems like there was more bad than good. I'm a celery. I'm us pretzels. And it got me thinking, why on earth is it so difficult for companies to make even remotely good commercials? You know what it feels like? It always just feels like somebody on the marketing team of these companies researched a particular culturally relevant topic. In this case, I don't know, watched like seven TikToks and went, okay, so this is the thing that people are saying, okay boomer, with absolutely no subcontext or depth to their understanding of the actual situation or what the jokes actually are or how to actually use them. It's like listening to somebody read a foreign language that they don't speak or understand. They don't know what they're saying. They don't know how to pronounce things and they don't know how to phrase things in any sensible way and anybody can listen to it or watch it and be like, hey, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. I felt that way with a number of different commercials this year, but one in particular stood out to me. This is how we must. And I'm going to pick on this commercial, not because it's the only one that was bad or it was somehow the worst, but because it really, for me, capitalized on this point of trying to use culturally relevant things, but just not really succeeding. Yes, I'm talking about the Sabra hummus commercials, of which there were three in a 60-second, 30-second and 15-second variation, but they all were basically the same thing. They're desperately trying to make must a verb. How do you must? Like, I must a cracker. I must celery. I must pretzels. Bananas. How do you must? I don't know. Feels like the type of thing that nobody's going to use ever. See, here's the thing. Phenomena like that, where a word becomes a verb like Xerox. I don't think I've heard anyone say that in years, but it was a thing at one point. But these instances where a brand name or slang term become verbs, they usually don't happen because some marketing company said, we're going to put out a commercial where we jam this down people's throats and hope that tomorrow it just becomes the thing that everyone went, hey, what a great idea. We should all start using this term now. No, it's something that develops over time. In some cases, it does become popularized by brilliant marketing, but that's over a long period of time. It's not like, let's buy, let's spend almost $20 million on this Super Bowl commercial and pay all these influencers and these famous people to be in our commercial because we're sure we include Rick Flair, Boomer Asiason, T-Pain and Charlie D'Amelio. We're hitting all the age brackets there and we're certain that somebody's going to latch on to this and start using it in their regular everyday vocabulary. That's not how any of this works. I feel like sometimes the problem with these commercials is that people are trying to grab so many different things, jam it into one 15 or 30 second spot and hope that their message is going to get across to show how good or connected or culturally aware a company is. They try to hit all the marks. They try to hit nostalgia. They try to hit inclusivity, young viral content, YouTubers. They covered all the bases and unfortunately none really effectively. And sometimes when a company does this, it just, it feels cheap. It feels forced and it just feels like, oh, I know what you're doing. It's not that there are bad ideas necessarily. It's just that you cannot force stuff like this to happen because not only does it not work like that, but the more you try to force it, the more us, the consumer audience is going to be like, no, stop. And if you look at any of the videos on Sabra's own YouTube channel, you can see that people weren't really connecting with it very well. I feel like they collected all of these influencers and famous people and thought that that alone was going to be the selling ticket and not what those people were there to do. Almost like that was an afterthought. They're just like, well, these people will do the selling for us. All we need to do is just give them some words to say or give them five words to say. That'll do the trick, surely. Oh, and the 15-second spot. Okay, Boomer. Did you get it? Did you get the joke? Because his name's Boomer and okay, but the joke, okay, did you get it? Yeah. Yeah, we got it. Just, I'm gonna need a minute. Poor Charlie, no, not poor Charlie D'Amelio. This is the awesome opportunity for her and she would have been dumb not to take it. I don't hold that against her at all, but it doesn't make the commercial any better. In case you've been living under a rock, which these days seems like a halfway decent place to spend some time, Charlie D'Amelio is where I would say she's got to be TikTok's most popular person right now. She's this 15-year-old kid who just blew up posting videos of her dancing. And she gets a ton of hate from, I presume, other 15-year-olds that are just upset that she's the one that blew up and not them. I don't really know. She did what any person should do in her situation, which is take a very opportune situation and run with it. And as I'm making this video, she has over 23 million followers on TikTok. People like to rag on TikTok and I understand that. I mean, just like any platform, you're gonna find a lot of stuff that's garbage, a lot of content that just makes you want to crawl into a hole. But you can't fault somebody for, she didn't expect she was gonna blow up. She just posted videos for fun and then all of a sudden the snowball started rolling. I mean, the same thing on a very, very, very miniature scale happened to me. I posted my stuff on TikTok and that's where everything kind of started for me. So I can't rag on TikTok too much because as much as there is content there that is like difficult to watch, a lot of people are gaining opportunities through this. So here she is, this 15 year old kid and from what I can tell, it seems like she's got a really great support system around her. But she's given this opportunity to be in a Superbowl commercial. You don't say no to that. The boomer, boomer joke just, it's not, it's not funny. It's not funny. There's a way to do that and have it be funny. That's not it. I don't even, I don't even understand what the point was. Like literally the whole point of the bit was that, get it? His name's boomer. There is nothing relevant to the joke about sitting there eating hummus. Mus. Sorry. I can't entirely blame these marketing departments because there's so many different levels of approval that all this stuff has to go through. Can you imagine being a company that's about to drop $20 million on the ad buy plus the production of these commercials? Like, you're not just going to let anything fly. I don't blame anybody that was in the commercials. I don't blame Charlie D'Amelio. I don't blame Zach King who's brilliant. And actually that part of the commercial was the only part that I thought was like neat. These are just people that are like, hell yeah, I'll be in a Superbowl commercial. Who wouldn't? But man, you'd think. I mean, it would be great if one day we could start making commercials that didn't make you grin so hard, but not this day. Anyways, that's just some thoughts I have watching the Superbowl. It kind of just an excuse to make the sketch at the beginning. Thanks for watching. If you like the video, please consider subscribing. I appreciate it and we'll see you next time.