While TV ads for personal sites may not be what everyone wants to see when they sit down to watch their favorite shows, they're becoming more and more common. Even gay ones, if you remember the ads that ran during - say - Will and Grace, Project Runway, or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
But now CBS has rejected a Super Bowl ad for gay dating website ManCrunch. It got me thinking, so I decided to go back and look at the last few years of Super Bowl ads to see what else has been rejected and/or accepted. This is not scientific or exhaustive, but still interesting...if nothing else for the sexy images of Danica Patrick, the flirtation with overt racism, pro-lifers, Snickers bars, extramarital dating, and the idea you'd want to take someone to Taco Bell on a first date.
So, to set the scene a little, in the CNN Money piece linked above, a spokesperson for CBS said:
"After reviewing the ad, which is entirely commercial in nature, our standards and practices department decided not to accept this particular spot,
Okay, that's fair. There was also some talk about possible financial issues as a reason the ad might have been dumped, though a ManCrunch spokeswoman said that they had offered to pay the $2.5 million in cash. That's a catfight I'm not prepared to wade into here.
Suffice it to say, the ad was rejected. Sure, it's their show: they can do whatever they want, more or less.
But they can't have thought people wouldn't raise h-e-double-hockey-sticks about this the same year they are on their way to accepting an ad by Focus on the Family along with Heisman winner Tim Tebow and his mother that, according to a FOTF spokesman is just about "celebrating families and celebrating life" and "not anti-anything."
Ah, of course.
Except that it seems fairly certain Tebow's mother's decision to not have an abortion when she fell ill while on a church mission trip in 1987 will likely play a big part in the ad. A decision that NOW points out wasn't much of a decision since abortion in the Phillippines, where Mrs. Tebow was, and is, illegal.
So, that's a little disingenuous and rather unfortunate. But not enough to make any kind of substantive claim that there is some kind of unseen moral force behind the accepting or dropping of ads. Until you consider what trash has aired in previous years.
My favorite, and the least racy of the ads that I'm including here, is the Taco Bell Super Bowl ad from 2009.
While a little creepy and stalker-ish, this ad reinforces a lot of "traditional" values. There is no untoward physical contact between the very new speed-dating couple. He even brings his parents along on their first date! Also, probably his last date, since she looks pretty classy and he is in - for God sakes - a Taco Bell. But, all in all, this is an ad that "nice:" people can watch and smile about while chomping down their Gordita or whatever.
So straight dating is okay - even speed dating. But, since that same year an ad for an extramarital dating site was rejected, we can assume, I guess, that network execs frown on extramarital affairs. And they have every right to - I'm not crazy about that site myself. Though I should point out that the ad made it on the air in Texas - red, "traditional values" Texas - because of declining ad revenues. And also because Texas was, at the time, the state with the most new members on the "dating" site. Yee-haw, y'all!
So, only straight, moral, married people are okay, right? Is that where we are?
Well, not exactly. Many of you will remember the Snickers commercial debacle from the 2007 Super Bowl.
Ahh, I get it. So gays actually wanting to meet each other, date, and - yes - possibly have sex is not okay. But making fun of gays is just fine! One of the alternate endings to this ad was the men attacking each other. Ha. Ha. Although that would have made more sense than this ending. Dude, proving you're manly by...taking hair off your chest? Having been something of a - er - fan of pictures of shirtless men for awhile now, I'll attest that many of them have shaved or well-trimmed chest. So...taking off your chest hair? It's kind of gay. In all fairness, I should note that the Snickers ad above ran during the 07 Super Bowl but, due to pressure from LGBT groups, was pulled in early February.
So if it's not the GAY part that's the problem - I'm sure the Snickers ad is not the only "ha ha, f-gs are funny" ad that's aired during the Super Bowl - maybe it's the possible impending sex part, yeah?
Well, no. There have recently been ads aired during the Super Bowl about guys taking home - or at least trying to take home - various women.
The first, from 2008, is baldly racist and I'm surprised more fuss wasn't made of it at the time.
The second, by GoDaddy, a webiste that helps you register domain names, ran in 2008, though you can visit their website to see the ads they ran in 2006, 07, and 09, as well as the ads that weren't aired and their submissions for 2010. They all run around the same kinds of themes, though.
So, CBS has aired gay content in its Super Bowl ads (although it's probably much more careful since the Snickers incident), and has run content that dances around sex and dating. On top of it, they're airing ads for "traditional" marriages and "traditional" families.
While the review of ads here has been far from complete (one of GoDaddy's ads rejected for 2010 contained not only a huge amount of T-and-A but also a giant flaming gay stereotype), it seems that what CBS and the Super Bowl are most scared of is real gays and lesbians, having real relationships. Gay visibility and political organizing has come a long way, but as long as "pinkface" schtick like the Snickers ad is still around, as long as Dr. William Tam can claim in court homosexuality and pedophilia are linked, as long as Don't Ask Don't Tell is still law, and as long as real LGBT persons are shoved out of national conversations because of "standards and practices," we still have a long way to go.