The Show:Super Bowl LI
The Moment: The censored ad
A struggling mother and daughter make their way north through the Mexican desert. The daughter collects scraps of cloth and plastic along the way. There the ad, for Pennsylvania-based company 84 Lumber, stops and directs viewers to Journey84.com.
In the online half of the ad, American workmen on the Mexican border saw lumber. The mother and daughter arrive at a huge, uncrossable wall. The mother cries. The daughter shows her what she’s been making with the scraps: an American flag.
Suddenly a truck drives by. The mother’s face lights up. The workmen weren’t building the wall. They were building a gate. Mother and daughter walk through to this line: “The will to succeed will always be welcome here.”
I thought Lady Gaga’s halftime extravaganza would make a statement against Trump’s refugee/immigrant ban. But she went for understatement, letting her lyrics and her dancers, a rainbow of race and gender, make a subtle point.
Instead, the statements came in the commercial breaks. Budweiser depicted the prejudice its German-immigrant founder faced. Coke revived a 2014 ad featuring a multilingual “America the Beautiful.” Audi advocated for equal pay. Google Home asked, “How do you say, ‘Nice to meet you?’ in Spanish?” And Airbnb announced, “The world is more beautiful the more you accept.”
84 Lumber was gutsiest: Fox rejected their full commercial as “too controversial.” The piece that aired sent so many viewers to the website that it crashed. Meanwhile, Donald Trump left his Mar-a-Lago viewing party after halftime. Because his team, the Patriots, was losing? Or because of the ads?
The Super Bowl aired on Fox and CTV. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.
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