Super Bowl Ads: the Seen and the Unseen

Picture from:
https://nypost.com/2021/01/24/many-super-bowl-advertisers-wont-have-commercials-this-year/

It seems that several large Super Bowl advertisers are refraining from buying ads this year for fear that no matter what they say, they will offend someone.

This is an interesting phenomenon: the market responding to changing market conditions, as what was until recently a blue-chip advertisement investment has become volatile - causing some formerly stolid investors to flee. This in turn sends a powerful market signal to every other market player, that maybe the ‘woke’ movement has peaked, that perhaps the consumers’ tastes are reflecting changing patterns. 

This is good and healthy feedback. 

Institutional bureaucracies - like large, lumbering corporations and inefficient universities - have invested heavily in being ‘woke’ - including creating large and expensive bureaucracies within bureaucracies dedicated to racial and sexual hygiene for the purposes of “diversity” (which has come to mean “conformity” in the Orwellian and Huxlean culture in which we find ourselves today).  These dinosaurs won’t be able to react quickly by, say, refusing to buy a Super Bowl ad. They will be on the hook to pay these extraordinary costs (which, if the market signals are correct) may well be headed to zero market value, and may even become a liability in short order. Time will tell. 

No matter how hard the ‘woke’ crowd presses, you can’t fool the market in the long term any more than you can fool Mother Nature. Once the end-consumer has had enough of being preached to, shamed, scolded, hectored, and lectured during an event that is supposed to be entertainment, that will be the point when the channel will change, or the TV will get switched off, or people will find other things to do - and the ads will then become worthless expenditures which reach fewer and fewer people. 

The NFL thrives on ad income. If the public has genuinely had enough of the owners and players trashing the things that ordinary Americans hold dear, that will be the end of the NFL’s gravy train to pay themselves to live like Middle Eastern emirs. While most of the low-watt players don’t have a clue about such things, the bean counters on Mahogany Row certainly do. They are watching closely. 

The ordinary American has more power than he thinks he does. Two quotes from Ludwig von Mises (from The Quotable Mises) express it well:

“Go into the home of the Average American family and you will see for whom the wheels of the machines are turning,” and, “What vitiates entirely the socialists’ economic critique of capitalism is their failure to grasp the sovereignty of the consumer in the market economy.”

Keep an eye on those Super Bowl ads. They may well be the canary in the coal mine.