This might be the most lucrative barrel selfie ever taken. And definitely the most seen. Kelly Slater gets barreled during Super Bowl commercial prime-time.
Any Super Bowl that literally ends with a fight is a good Super Bowl. Yes, it was a terrible display of sportsmanship and poor judgment in both playmaking and gamesmanship by the Seahawks in the closing seconds of America’s greatest sporting event, but, boy, was it entertaining. Which is mostly the point. Even if you hate both teams, you’ve got to respect them for battling to the final knee. The unpredictability! The miscalculations! The fight! That’s the beauty of sport.
And amidst the marketing money ball that is the Super Bowl, we’ve got commercials. Sometimes they upstage the game itself. This time, that was not the case. And as much as I enjoy watching agencies spend economies worth of cash (an estimated $360M this year) on revitalizing their client’s brand DNA, it’s hard not to look at all of them and scream bullshit. For instance, I learned today that McDonald’s actually doesn’t want to make money in 2015. They’ve shifted focus to enable their customers to pay for their meals with love. And not prostitution, which might feel more appropriate for the Golden Arches. Nope, just good ol’ fashioned calls home to Mom. Luckily, the campaign happens to also speak to millennials and includes a tie-in across social channels. #ESSENTIAL
So when the marketing gurus can throw surfing and snowboarding into the Super Bowl commercial cauldron, well, it definitely increases our market value. Or sinks it, depending on how you look at it. But the following three commercials certainly had me perk up–if only for a second–when they aired. They included an homage to the ocean, a remarkable woman breaking boundaries in the snow, and, our captain, King Kelly Slater, getting barreled. Go us.
1. #SUPERBOWLRALLY
I don’t know what this was advertising. Aside from the Super Bowl, which I was already watching and seemed to render the ad entirely unnecessary. NOT unnecessary, however, was Kelly Slater getting barreled at the :33s mark and screaming to the 112M+ fans simultaneously viewing. That’s, by far, Kelly Slater’s most-watched barrel. EVER. Yeah, Kelly! And depending how the estimated $4.5 million per :30s commercial spot economics work when filtered to talent, that might be the most lucrative tenth of a second second barrel ever, too. Double hoot for Kelly!
2. Carnival Cruises
That’s a hell of a JFK quote, and it’d sit prettier in a thoughtful Cyrus Sutton film than peddling cruises. I’d rather eat a bag of sand at Surfrider Beach than take a Carnival Cruise. But they gave us a nice quote that could beautifully open a piece about death and big-wave surfing. I thank them for that. And we might use it. Quote below:
“We all came from the sea, and it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean…We are tied to the ocean, and when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail, or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came.”
3. Amy Purdy Is a Badass
She speaks for herself. Maybe buy a Camry because of her?
