Advertising is more than just a platform for connecting us to the products we want — it’s the medium that makes the earth rotate once a day.
OK, well that’s an exaggeration, but you get the point: marketing is king.
And this Sunday it’s the king’s birthday so we all better bend a knee and swear loyalty.
As much as the Super Bowl is about the game of football, it’s equally about the league’s corporate partners and any outsider desperate enough to funnel a million or more bucks to get 30 seconds of airtime. (Spoiler alert: there’s always some desperate sucker willing to fork over an unnecessary amount of money to get people pay attention to him; that’s just human nature.)
What this means for us, the consumer, is we have to be paying attention to two things at once. First, there’s the narrative of the game — which team’s winning, who’s playing well, what does the losing team need to better, etc. Then, there’s following the commercials — which celebrities are in demand this year, which company spent the most money to get onto air during the first game break, what is this year’s funniest ad, etc.
It can be an exhausting night. To help you out, we’ve created the official Super Bowl Commercials Drinking Game to follow when the commercials are on — this way you’re never bored and you’re constantly drinking.
Fair warning: some ads may you require to take one drink and then another two/three drinks. For example, a car commercial with a baby.
Good luck!
Take one drink for every commercial that features:
- A foreign car company
- A current NFL player
- An overview camera shot
- A puppy (grown dogs don’t count)
- An American beer company
- Car insurance
- Hot food
- A movie trailer for a sequel and/or remake
- Some sort of message about drug use/addiction
Take two drinks for every commercial that features:
- Animation
- A baby (double that to four drinks if the baby is outsmarting an adult)
- A horse
- A red-headed spokeswoman
- A promotion for a TV show that you’ve never seen
- The word “sex” or “sexy”
- A website
- More than five people in it
Take three drinks for every commercial that features:
- A violent video game
- A gray-haired spokesman
- A Marvel comic book movie
- An athlete or coach who’s playing in the Super Bowl
- A movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
- Lingerie or models wearing lingerie
- An athlete from a different professional sports league
Take a shot for every commercial that features:
- Some pro-military message
- A foreign alcohol company (Jameson, Svedka, etc.)
- A celebrity from the 1990s
Finish your drink for every:
- Commercial you don’t understand
- Commercial that enrages you more than having to sit and watch the Seahawks-Patriots play each other for four hours (sorry, I had to)
Now go forth and play our Official 2015 Super Bowl Commercials Drinking Game. You won’t regret that you did.