PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE | FEBRUARY 8, 2021

Super Bowl Ads

The day after the Super Bowl is typically devoted to chatting with friends about a disappointing game (I’m a Vikings fan, OK), what happened at your Super Bowl party (now limited in the 2021 Covid-19 conditions) and what was the best ad you saw (I’m torn between Bruce Springsteen’s mediation about America’s middle, and the meditation on Michael B. Jordan’s middle after he took off his shirt in the Alexa ad last night). 

Didn’t watch the Super Bowl? Click here to view the ad. 

A long-time public access advocate who’s now retired argued about the harm Wayne’s World did for public access television in the 1990s.  They contended the film and the Saturday Night Live sketches trivialized PEG – and created a stigma of stupidity that plagues us close to thirty years later. 

I don’t agree.  

Sure, I’ve met young men (why is it always men?) who wanted to create television after watching the films – and their ideas for programming weren’t that original or were vanity projects.  But they were a very tiny minority of all the people I have met in the last twenty years in community television who wanted to create something inspiring or valuable for others in their city or town.  

For me, the charm of Myers and Carvey’s characters comes from the creativity they derive from just about anything – in their basements.  And the films themselves are an early example of media literacy embedded in commercial film (again, credit probably goes to the punk director Spheeris).  

And the irony of the moment for me is that this ad is for a massive company, but is about supporting local businesses - and that parallels the heart of what all our channels are about, supporting local expression, creativity and civic education and empowerment.

So Party On, Wayne and Garth. Next time, let’s see an ad that says “Watch Local”.