What in the world is Super Bowl Special

Buckle up, this is going to be a loooong one.

Super Bowl Special has many problems; the description alone links a bunch of unrelated tropes together and has references that don't do anything to actually describe the trope, such as the Wardrobe Malfunction example, there's no examples and natter everywhere. All but one didn't immediately jumped out to me, that issue being, to put it simply, this trope has no idea what type of page it wants to be.

As an actual trope, it seems awfully chairs-y, with in-universe examples simply amounting to "Superbowl commercials exist/are mentioned", and out-of-universe ones amounting to "Addressing the audience is sometimes treated as if it's only over subtle issues or conclusive merchandising". "Conclusive" merchandising is one of the things that immediately make this more-or-less meaningless, considering the merch in question has no actual effect on how much the audience vocalizes the feelings in the commercial regardless of whether it's spewed at them through rapid-fire speech that hardly explains it (even if there's a Refuge in Audacity edge where the mystery of the product entices them less than the barely comprehensible explanation, which does feel like a pretty viable concept).

Then there's how this trope would fit under Trivia. It's not at all clear that it's not limited to actors or musicians doing something a la Money, Dear Boy, both because a) a lot of emphasis is put on small-time ads gaining more traction through a sudden disregard of historical events that helped them (the Cash4Gold.com example being a big one), implying that this can arise from union issues rather than basic advertising agency issues, and b) because behind the scenes footage is also given a lot of emphasis, but only ever seems to be implemented into an example of several movie casts/random actors for some purpose, even if non-actors are in the background (note the emphasis on fictional people vs. real people in the "Together We Make Football" example). I actually had no idea this was specifically an advertising trope for these reasons until I looked at the indexing, since it seemed like a general case of Tropes Hidden from Audience due to the inclusion of movie trailers/the behind the scenes aspect, so I don't think this is an "advertising tropes are, fundamentally speaking, the same as Forgotten Tropes" issue.

How it would work as an Audience Reaction is a little less complicated, but could be a much bigger issue than I'm making it out to be—the amount of natter implies that this is being viewed as something with a popularity threshold that people believe work in spite of lewdness/censor decoys rather than because of it due to the censorship often being based on Values Dissonance in place of something like Sex Sells, another thing that seems like a viable concept—but it's also being treated in entries as something that can be due to invokedUnfortunate Implications, making it look like unnecessary documentation of broken bases at best and flat-out contridactory at worst.

Finally, there's the Useful Notes aspect to it. The first couple of paragraphs in the description focus on how the budget is given the most attention out of any behind the scenes aspect, implying that ad agencies can get more freedom as to what they can get away with in general, supported by entries describing how some companies can "take off" where other competitors failed no questions asked (Diet Pepsi, Anheuser-Busch buying an ad, etc), but the latter can occasionally happen without the former according to other examples (and just regular common knowledge), sometimes with ad agencies being merely encouraged by previous budget decisions rather then having any direct role in how they're made, making this skirt the line between Trivia.

So now that that's out of the way, where do we go from here? Should we go somewhere from here other than moving some things to an Analysis page, assuming small changes are possible at this point? I'm been ruminating on this for a few days; even this very post was one I wasn't sure I actually wanted to finish, since all I know so far is what I've laid out— this is an old trope but I haven't done that much digging in the Wayback Machine like I normally would, and it might not be super important just yet.

It's an Advertising Trope. The basic idea is that it's supposed to be a big, special, usually unique TV ad that a company puts on for a major event, like the Super Bowl.

The point of my post is that I get what it's supposed to be, but not what it is.

I feel like you're overthinking it. None of the issues you mentioned even jump out at me at all; it's literally just a page to catalogue unique Superbowl Advertising. It's not trying to be anything else; it's just describing how these commercials often manifest as well as some background as to why.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jan 4th 2024 at 3:17:11 PM

Is it an actual trope, though? It feels more like Trivia.

Advertising Tropes are still tropes, yeah. You just have to think of them as troping the commercials themselves.

Though, since it's about where/when the work is released, rather than about the content of the work, I could see it being put under Trivia instead, like we do with Direct to Video.

I mean, technically, but it's not just "this was released on the Superbowl". Superbowl commercials are almost always higher quality, have funny gimmicks, and are designed to be as interesting as possible.

If Super Bowl adverts are their own distinct genre (can't tell, not from Eagleland), then it is valid as an article. Not sure where it should go, however. It belongs in the same category as Dump Months and Friday Night Death Slot, being about the work's publishing more than the work itself.

The only real thing wrong with the actual concept is that it's pretty US-specific. The World Cup is mentioned in the last line of the description, and claims the same phenomenon occurs there, but only a few examples deal with the World Cup (probably because most editors would assume it's misuse, but there's really no better place to put them). The examples could use folders or some type of sorting though, since the page is basically a big wall of text with no actual order to the examples.

I'm from the UK too and I always got the impression they are a district "thing" from seeing them discussed in American media. I don't think we have an equivalent I don't think anyone remembers which ads air during the FA Cup which doesn't have the same cultural fixture that the Super Bowl does I don't think. I think the closest we get is people fixating on certain Christmas ads like the John Lewis and M&S ones... and Kevin the Carrot.

Edited by GracieLizzy on Jan 4th 2024 at 10:52:45 AM

Yeah, it's an American thing. There's even a running joke that some people watch solely for the commercials, because they're the one time of year anyone even cares about them. Companies really go all out. I can understand why it would be more confusing if you're not in the US, though.

Super Bowl ads are a Canadian thing as well. In fact, there has been pressure to allow American ads specifically for the Super Bowl, but CTV, which owns the Canadian rights to the Super Bowl, opposes them.

Perhaps this could be mentioned as well.

Would it make sense to treat this as a tv show? Also, Wardrobe Malfunction is mostly relevant to the Half Time Show. If only the ads are relevant than the name should be changed to Super Bowl Ads.

No, it wouldn't; because yeah, it genuinely is just about the super bowl advertisements.

I could see the argument for it being Trivia, or even Media Notes. Most of what makes a Super Bowl Special distinct is the high budget, which is Trivia, but it manifests onscreen in a glitzy way, which isn't Trivia. It's sort of like a less subjective Oscar Bait thing, maybe?

Either way it's definitely worth cataloguing, as it shows that these companies could afford to advertise during the biggest advertising event of the year, and notes specifically how they made their ads stand out from their other ads (and their competitors' ads). It's just badly organized because of how little love Advertising Tropes get, meaning less maintenance.

Edited by mightymewtron on Jan 8th 2024 at 9:24:23 AM

My suggestion is to rename to Super Bowl Ads and treat it as a show with multiple creators.

But it would be under the Advertising namespace, albeit one treated as a show with multiple creators

And it's not one single work. I don't see the value in pretending like it is; why can't it just be an Advertising Trope?

I should mention (since I haven't been super involved in overall discussion, and I looked into the description's history a bit more) that I don't really see value in TLP'ing a separate trope for the "multiple creators" aspect, but it seems that's part of what makes it an Advertising Trope specifically (aside from the fact that these are commercials); the more people that tune in to the commercials, the higher the cost of plugging something is. The opposite happening on a less broad scale for silly reasons—lower costs because there's more defrauding involved—might be worth its own trope, but most Advertising Tropes are really old. I don't know how well that'd go over, unless it'd be kept In-Universe Examples Only and real life examples are limited to fraud that already happened X years ago/people make fun of.