Super Bowl LV is more than a showdown of two of the league’s most dangerous quarterbacks in Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes – it’s the home of TV’s biggest and best ads, an the biggest nights for music artists and their fans. It only takes listing the past performers (and even attendees) to realise how bloody huge it has become.
On the sports front, 43-year-old Tom Brady won his seventh ring as he led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — a team that didn’t sniff the playoffs last season — to a Super Bowl victory. And in so doing, he buried the conversation — that conversation.
“I think that man [Brady] has answered a lot of questions about whether he can get this done outside of the halls of the New England Patriots,” ESPN’s Louis Riddick said in commentary.
“… What he’s done this season, going to a new team in the midst of this pandemic, and winning this team over, leading them, bringing everybody’s level of play up has been nothing short of amazing. It is, in my opinion, the most amazing accomplishment in sports in our country.”
Riddick added: “There’s no question he’s the greatest of all time. And to beat Patrick Mahomes when everybody said, ‘this is the guy that’s going to be on your tail’; this shuts the door on that conversation.”
While the sport itself is absolutely the most important part of the day, it’s not always the most interesting…
Reddit spent their ‘entire marketing budget’ on a five-second ad
The spot, which was just five seconds, opened as if it were a car commercial, but then quickly flashed to Reddit’s orange and white logo, which was followed by a message.
“If you’re reading this, it means our bets paid off,” the message read.
“One thing we learned from our communities last week is that underdogs can accomplish just about anything when we come together around a common area.”
Reddit said it spent the “entire marketing budget” on the ad, which the company’s Chief Marketing Officer Roxy Young said “was not part of our marketing plan.”
“But we were so inspired by the power of our communities in recent weeks that we rallied to pull it together in just a few short days in collaboration with our agency partners at R/GA,” she told CNN Business in an email statement.
A man from Texas made a $4.5m Super Bowl bet from his phone
Houston furniture retailer Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale flew to Colorado on Wednesday night and placed one of the largest Super Bowl bets ever from his mobile phone: $US3.46 million ($4.5 million).
His bet? That the Tampa Bay Buccaneers would cover the 3.5-point spread against the favoured Kansas City Chiefs, according to DraftKings, which took the bet through its mobile app.
Mr McIngvale had to gamble from the airport in Colorado Springs because Texas hasn’t legalised such bets. Good luck indeed.
The Weeknd explained his face bandage saga
The Weeknd recently offered a (brief) explanation of his latest visual approach, ahead of his headlining performance at today’s Super Bowl Halftime Show.
“The significance of the entire head bandages is reflecting on the absurd culture of Hollywood celebrity and people manipulating themselves for superficial reasons to please and be validated,” he told Variety this week.
“It’s all a progression and we watch The Character’s storyline hit heightened levels of danger and absurdity as his tale goes on,” he added.
“I suppose you could take that being attractive isn’t important to me but a compelling narrative is,” he also said.
And what a narrative it is. The Weeknd’s grisly facade seems to trace back to his “Blinding Lights” music video, released at the top of last year.
Timothee Chalamet became Edward Scissorhands’ son
In one of our favourite ads that aired during the Super Bowl, Cadillac enlisted the help of Timothée Chalamet to take on the role of Edward Scissorhands’s son, Edgar Scissorhands. Winona Ryder reprises her role from Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands as Edward’s love interest, Kim Boggs, who is now the mother of Edgar. As Edgar accidentally pierces a football, becomes a magnet in class, and shreds the bell on the bus, he becomes ecstatic when he realises his unusual hands can’t damage his new self-driving Cadillac.
Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski’s talked retirement
Definitely not an ad that aired during the game, Quarterback Tom Brady and tight end Rob Gronkowski partnered up this year on a new commercial for carrier network T-Mobile; the Super Bowl ad fills in the fictional backstory of how and why both players ended up playing for the Buccaneers.
The film shows Brady and Gronk catching up via video chat, with Brady pondering his next move and considering retirement. Gronk encourages him to do so, singing the praises of a life of leisure in sunny Florida. “If you retire now, you’re going to be walking on soft sand in a week,” he says. “Retirement is like winning another one! Maybe I’ll even join you.”
The central conceit of the ad, however, is that the two legendary athletes are talking over a poor cell connection, meaning what Brady ends up hearing is: “If you retire now, you’re soft and weak… Just come to Florida and win another one, maybe I’ll even join you.”
Unfortunately the ad didn’t air due to some legal issues relating to a “protected telco rights deal.”
People like dips
Google released information regarding search terms around this time of year before the big game and tweeted out a map of the United States to show what dishes got the most search traction leading up to the game. Dips were coded with the colour yellow and with even just a quick look, it’s clear that dips are overwhelmingly the winner as far as food preferences for game day.
