Had enough 24/7 social justice and Black Lives Matter with your football yet? Before you answer, know this: CBS and the National Football League don’t believe you have. They’re planning to double down on political correctness and virtue signaling in the upcoming Super Bowl game, set to be played Feb. 7 in Tampa.
Bruce Haring, who writes for Deadline, informs us that lovable puppies and horses, as well as weird snack food commercials won’t be prevalent during the CBS broadcast. Social and racial justice issues and COVID-19-related messages will be prominent during the Super Bowl, the most-watched television event of the year, according to a sports business trade report.
“It’s going to be ‘Black Lives Matter,’ it’s going to be COVID. It’s going to be [about] coming together,” says Bill Oberlander, the co-founder and executive creative director of the ad agency OBERLAND, in an interview with Front Office Sports. Oh, joy!
The NFL and CBS believe they are on the right side of television viewer priorities by promoting BLM Marxism. For, as Haring explains, Oberland’s firm and real-time market research firm Suzy conducted a study that revealed “brands are more at risk from saying nothing than speaking out against racism.”
Thus the me-too virtue signaling by corporate America that they are not racists, that they are all on board with Black Lives Matter.
The NFL ought to know better than this. After all, it’s taking a bath on television ratings this season. People aren’t buying into Black Lives Matter (see photo above) and social justice-themed end zones, helmets and protests as much as the league and the left-stream media believe they do. The decision to go heavy on social justice messaging during the Super Bowl is a calculated risk and a foolish one.
The survey cited by Haring found that some 80 percent of consumers want brands to respond to racism with statements or donations to anti-racism groups. A third of the respondents ages 19-26 indicated they won’t do business with organizations that remained silent after since George Floyd’s May 25 death.
An Apple’s Beats video by Dre, “You Love Me”, is purportedly representative of what football fans are craving. Japanese tennis pro Naomi Osaka and African American NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace are featured in the video, which includes the statement “You love Black culture. But you do love me?” It’s up to 22 million views. Oberlander says:
“I can’t imagine that advertisers are not going to use this as an opportunity to speak up on behalf of their brands — or on behalf of the social impact that’s going on all around.”
The NFL also shot itself in the foot with the recent announcement that The Weeknd, a performer whose recordings have been slammed by the New York Post as "standard gutter garbage, sexually explicit and vulgar including a reliance on the N-word to reference black men,” will perform for the Super Bowl halftime show.
And now the news about a Super Bowl that promises to be saturated with offensive social justice/Black Lives Matter propaganda. Which is essentially the glorification of suspects and criminals who’ve engaged in altercations with police officers.
Super Bowl television ratings have declined in four of the last five years (showing only a small increase last year). But this year the NFL’s found the magic bullet! It’s more social justice, not less. Let the seller beware.
