Maybe if the Business editors of the New York Times were paying a little bit more attention to, say, business, New York Times wouldn't have posted $648 million dollars in losses last quarter. But as it is they were instead apparently watching the game last weekend and thought they'd make it a tax write-off by publishing this bizarre article just below the fold:
No commercial that appeared last night during Super Bowl XLI directly addressed Iraq, unlike a patriotic spot for Budweiser beer that ran during the game two years ago. But the ongoing war seemed to linger just below the surface of many of this year’s commercials.
More than a dozen spots celebrated violence in an exaggerated, cartoonlike vein that was intended to be humorous, but often came across as cruel or callous.
And a little later:
Then, too, there was the unfortunate homonym at the heart of a commercial from Prudential Financial, titled “What Can a Rock Do?"
The problem with the spot, created internally at Prudential, was that whenever the announcer said, “a rock” — invoking the Prudential logo, the rock of Gibraltar — it sounded as if he were saying, yes, “Iraq.”
Did anybody else watch the super bowl and not think "Golly, all this cartoonish violence and subtle homonym. It really makes me think of the war in the Middle East"?
Terry Tate: Office Linebacker and symbol of a grieving nation
Cari Wolfert @ Sat, 02/10/2007 - 12:23pm
I have to kind of agree that there did seem to be a lot of violence in this year's Super Bowl commercials, but I think it is pretty ignorant to blame it on the war in Iraq. The only correlation I can see is that the American public maybe is becoming more tolerant of violence because of what they are watching on the news, and now advertising companies think they have the ability to take their ads further because of it.
I didn’t get a chance to watch the Prudential commercial that you mention, but I find it hard to believe that they purposely were trying to make “a rock” sound like Iraq. And side note, I love that Terry Tate: Office Linebacker commercial. It’s hysterical! “That’s a long distance call, DOUG!”