My Super Bowl Ad

Curses! Foiled again!

Every year I try but once again this year nobody saw my Super Bowl ad selling my books.

NBC broadcasting sold every single one of the 69 Super Bowl ad spots. According to the Washington Post newspaper, the TV company charged $3 million dollars for each 30 second spot generating an income of $206 million in advertising revenue. The Post estimates that 98 million people watched the game.

Not one of these people saw my ad.

Here’s why:

My February Social Security check has not come in yet so I was a trifle short of having the $3 million needed to buy a regular ad.

I worked around that.

To understand how I did, here’s a little background first.

One source I’ve read said that Tiffany and Co. produces the Vince Lombardi Super Bowl Trophy as well the Super Bowl champion rings. The silver trophy weighs about 250 troy ounces. It’s valued at $100,000.

Usually I fall asleep by the end of the game so I’d never actually seen this trophy. In fact, I don’t even remember ever having seen a picture of it.

My mistake—I made an assumption.

You see, about 55 year ago, when I was a Boy Scout, I won a big silver loving cup; it looked a lot like this:

Now my parents had not attended the awards banquet, so I had to walk home lugging this huge silver cup. When I walked in the house with it, my shocked mother accused me of stealing it. She could not believe I had won such a trophy till I showed her my name which a jeweler had engraved on the cup’s base.

By then I’d taken off my Scout uniform and dressed in civilian clothes. But now, she wanted a photograph and forced me to put my uniform shirt back on and pose for a picture with the bitter cup.

I hope I have never done such a joy-killing thing to my own children but, God help me and them, I imagine that I have.

Anyhow, in my mind a valuable Super Bowl trophy must look like that old one I once won—a big silver loving cup.

So, here was my Super Bowl ploy—

I slipped $3 (that’s three dollars, not three million) to a stagehand working the game. He agreed to paste a sticker with my Bluefish Books logo under the bottom of the Vince Lombardy Super Bowl Trophy.

That way, when the winning quarterback drank campaign out of the cup at the end of the game, as he upended the cup—it must hold at least two magnums of campaign—as he chugalugged campaign in front of rolling TV cameras, all 98 million viewers would see my Bluefish Books logo on the bottom of the cup.

Here’s that beautiful logo:

Alas, it turns out that the real Super Bowl trophy is not a cup at all—it’s just a tinfoil football on a pole. The thing looks like this:

Nobody could drink campaign out that thing.

Not even with a straw.

Besides, all either team’s quarterbacks drank during the game was Gatorade out of a plastic squeeze bottle.

That’s why nobody saw my Super Bowl ad, my Bluefish Books logo glued underneath the bottom. of that trophy.

Somebody at NBC owes me my $3 back!

However, on the up side, yesterday’s Times-Union carried an announcement about my friend Barbara White’s Bluefish books on the newspaper’s bookpage which—it being Super Bowl Sunday—was read by at least 9 or 8 people (not 98 million).

Here’s a copy of that notice:

Former T-U Staffer Publishes New Series

Florida Times-Union religion editor Barbara White wrote a weekly column for 15 years. It described her personal spiritual journey, and readers drew inspiration and encouragement from her popular "Along the Way" column. Editors at Jacksonville's Bluefish Books collected the best of these columns in a four-book series called "Along the Way" ($16.95). It is available at www.bluefishbooks.info. White, who worked at the paper for more than 25 years, retired in 1994.

So, Barbara’s books got a media mention on Super Bowl Sunday.

My books didn’t.

Curses! Foiled again!

All I can say, like the Arizona Cardinals, is, “Just you wait’ll next year!”