Most years, the ads are the most memorable part of the Super Bowl, this year the game was. The ads, well, they left a lot to be desired.
The Super Bowl ads this year were not memorable, as companies seemed to be trying to play it safe, and safe usually means boring. For $7 million for 30 seconds, you’d think companies would be interested in being as memorable as possible, no matter what. But in the age of woke, where being offended is just this side of an Olympic event and so many people are going for the gold, memorable can be a problem. So you end up with boring and forgettable, mostly. Yet, there were a few ads that stick a week later, and at least one for all the wrong reasons.
The only “good” ads were the Dunkin’ Donuts ad featuring Matt Damon and Tom Brady (I realize Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were in it too, but they weren’t the entertaining part of it) and the State Farm ad featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The Schwarzenegger ad was the funniest ad by far because it wasn’t politically correct. The whole ad was spent making fun of his accent, which is surprisingly strong for someone who’s spent the last 56 years living in the United States, particularly when it comes to words ending with “er” sound.
Bud Light tried, it just didn’t work. They’re trying to climb out from the hole they dug by hiring Dylan Mulvaney, but they still don’t seem to be aware of why the whole thing bothered so many. Their ad took all the risk of a tightrope walker about 6 inches off the ground, and was just as memorable.
Then there were the three, yes three, ads for Temu, the discount website.
There’s a chance you hadn’t heard of Temu before they dropped a small fortune trying to compete with established online retailers, but if you’ve spent any time online in the last year or so, you’ve likely seen one of their banner ads, even if it didn’t register.
Temu has been big on social media and random banners ads for a while, but the Super Bowl is their attempt to cross into the big time. Who doesn’t love saving a lot of money on random goods and things like clothes?
You might wonder how it is a site like Temu can save people so much money – they’re basically giving away thing, when you compare prices with other retailers. Well, the answer is pretty simple: slaves.
Think about all the money you could save if you had a company that manufactured goods but you didn’t have to pay anyone to do it. I’m not talking about automation, robots cost money to buy and maintain, I’m talking about people. What would normally be “employees” to regular companies are just people, a different version of property, to China. And Temu is China.
Sure, they claim they aren’t owned by the Chinese Communist Party, but the “Communist” part of the CCP isn’t there as a fashion statement, they really are communists, and communist regimes don’t accept the concept of “private property. Any company that operates in or from China is owned by the CCP. That’s what makes every time the CEO of TikTok testifies before Congress that he’s independent so hilarious.
China needs the money. While the size of their economy is ranked second, their per capita ranking is 72nd. Citizens are property of the state, therefore they are disposable, but a state does need citizens, so they do have to be able to feed them. A starving population can rise up and overthrow their government in totalitarian regimes, because those in power are severely outnumbered by the rest of the citizenry. Money must be earned for that somehow.
China has been enslaving Uyghur Muslims for years; exploiting them for free manufacturing in the remote Xinjiang region of China, well outside the prying eyes of western powers. “Out of sight, out of mind” is how much of the world thinks about them, but they can’t escape them. If you buy goods from China, there’s a better than average chance it was made with Uyghur slave labor. If you buy something because it’s “surprisingly cheap” on Temu, well, you know the rest.
Spending $21 million on Super Bowl ads is easy when your overhead for labor is extremely low. That CBS happily took the money is their shame, if you feed their slavery machine by buying their cheap wares, that shame is yours.
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).
