Super Bowl Sunday is America's great secular feast day, loosely organized around a professional championship football game but centered on food, parties, music, advertising and consumer hoopla and folderol in all shapes and size.
Big companies and their advertising agencies break the bank for branding, but in today's connected world the Super Bowl - or "the big game" in the parlance that so many non rights holders are forced to use - has also become something of a blank slate: a vast communal moment when the biggest audience of the year is gathered not only in front of their big screen TVs, but on their digital networks as well.
Enter citizens movements, social causes, and crowd sorcerers of more stripes than a cadre of NFL refs. Sure, it costs a mint for 30 seconds of Super Bowl time - but when huge percentages of the population are gathered around a single event, there's an opening to make yourself heard. Here are a few campaigns I found more interesting than DeflateGate:
The feminist group UltraViolet is running a controversial Super Bowl ad campaign - first rejected, then accepted by Sports Illustrated - demanding that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell resign over the league's highly criticized domestic violence policies. Nita Chaudhary, co-founder of UltraViolet, responded to the commissioner's Super Bowl press conference this week: “Goodell has clearly lost touch with America, as the public’s faith in the NFL is plummeting. The NFL’s leadership vacuum on the issue of domestic violence continues to hurt the league. Polling shows women are fed up, a huge problem for a league currently relying on women for their future growth. The facts remain: under Goodell’s watch 55 cases of domestic violence went unanswered. The NFL needs leadership to get out of this mess, and Goodell is no leader.” The organization is also arranging for four large trucks to circle the Super Bowl venue in Phoenix with ads demanding the league reform its policy.
In June the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office pulled the trademark registration of Washington DC's NFL franchise over its offensive team nickname. Tomorrow, a large coalition of indigenous groups and native American civil rights organizations will protest the continued use of the racial term "redskins" by a football team in the nation's capital with a rally in downtown Phoenix. The hashtag for the protest is #NotYourMascot and the main organizer is Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry, which has also led protests of the Kansas City Chiefs and Cleveland Indians. This year, in the wake of the Ray Rice incident and other cases in pro sports, the organization is highlighting its work against domestic violence, particularly with regard to native American women. “A lot of the stereotypes promoted by mascots are…the warrior image. The flip-side of that is the ‘Poca-hottie,’ the Savage Squaw, the person who is sexually available to the white man, and that is a big part of the story of America, this idea that there is some Indian princess out there,” EONM Jacqueline Keeler told the website ThinkProgress.
In Charlotte, NC a group of moms is keeping Super Bowl party shopping away from a chain of stores than encourages an "open carry" climate for shoppers where guns can be toted among the chicken wings and chips.
Under the #BlackLivesMatter banner, activists are organizing around the Super Bowl in several locations - including Brooklyn's Barclay's Center - to protest the deaths of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement. A coalition of groups plans a symbolic release of black balloon in Phoenix, Brooklyn and other locations. It's unclear whether discussions about actually disrupting the venue in Phoenix will lead to a major protest there; often #BlackLivesMatter protests aren't well publicized before they take place.
