Eaon Pritchard says that this year's SuperBowl adfest was so irony-laden, so ‘knowing’, so reflexive and so thoroughly postmodern that he had difficulty keeping one eyebrow raised for the duration.

In 2010 some boffins in a leading Greek university conducted a study of over 1500 Super Bowl commercials going back to 1969 and through to 2009.

They concluded that the use of what they called ‘postmodern’ advertising devices - surreal visuals, symbolic associations and humorous juxtapositions - had increased significantly during the last four decades. Whereas ‘modern’ advertising approaches – things like expert testimonials and high levels of informational content - had reduced.

That was in 2010 though. Since then the collective ad industry seems to have said; ‘You want postmodern ads? Hold my Bud Lite…’
I’m going to posit that 2023’s AdBowl has been possibly the most postmodern to date.

What do I mean by postmodern advertising?
First, we need to make one important distinction; between postmodern culture (of which advertising and SuperBowl are a part) and postmodernist theory or ‘postmodernism’ proper. Theory refers to the group of philosophers and critics (mostly French), affected by the postmodern culture in the 60s, and who called into question the validity of modernist concepts like reason and science.

What we are interested in is postmodern culture, or ‘postmodernity’, the epoch in history in which we are living.
While post-modernity is of course a pre-digital phenomenon, many of the attributes of post-modernity – especially the notions of simulacra, fake news, irrationality, post-truth and scepticism for reality – have been supercharged by the internet.
TikTok’s commodification-of-everything, performative, ironic, playful and infantile premise is utterly post-modern. It’s to this culture that postmodern advertising seems to hold up a mirror.

In this year's slew of ads, the shift is one further towards reflexivity.
An almost totalising onslaught of self-conscious and self-contradictory qualities, in particular, the use of pastiche and parody. Each ad seems to be saying something and at the same time put quotation marks around what is being said. Even ironic becomes ‘ironic’

Imagine a virtual open-mic night at a comedy club, conducted over TikTok where each act has 30 seconds to make an impression. And they all tell the same joke.
‘Hey, this is an ad. We ‘know’ it’s an ad. You know it's an ad. And we know that you know that we know that you know it's an ad’. Kinda trying.

Having said that, there were a few standouts.

PopCorners ‘Breaking Bad’ parody will no doubt be at the top of many people’s lists. Obviously, it leans heavily on intertextuality. Meaning the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text. A go-to tactic for the postmodern creatives (yay, we don’t have to write anything!)
As one sharp wit on Twitter pointed out ‘...there is only one place great ideas come from. The executives must now spend weeks trawling their memories for famous scenes from films and TV shows that they can steal in their entirety.’ But it will get noticed and there was plenty of pack shot action.

UberOne was the pick of the crop. Oozing postmodern self-reflexivity from the get-go.
An ad about the making of the ad, except its not the real ad.
P-Puff-Daddy-Diddy auditions various 90s one-hit wonders who sing their hits in an attempt to find a jingle (hey, the retro irony). It’s textbook Metafiction. Or meta advertising. A form of advertising that emphasises its own narrative structure in a way that continually reminds the audience that THEY ARE VIEWING AN AD (as if they didn’t already know).
Metafiction is achingly self-conscious about language, form, and story-telling and, most importantly, directly draws attention to its status as an artefact.
However, this does make its working elements more visible. A kind of operational transparency, making it useful to consumers despite the contradiction.
In a more traditional sense, even amongst all the ‘knowing’ irony, it delivers Whopper of a costly signal. The price of Diddy, the various talent who cameo and the licensing for the tracks must have taken a large bite out of Uber’s (albeit substantial) coffers.
The end tagline is the killer bit of reflexivity - almost as if lifted directly from the clients' list of objectives in the original brief - ‘Get that stuck in your head’. Well done!

Pringles get the prize for pseudo-insight of the year. No one has ever got their hand stuck in the tube. No amount of disarming deployment of irony is going to make that stick. Unless it sparks some idiotic TikTok trend amongst essential workers.

Workday’s ‘Rockstar’ is another stand-out. The rockstar-as-metaphor for basic competence meme has broken out into the mainstream from its origins in tech-bro speak and has been floating about in the ether as an ad-waiting-to-happen for about 15 years. Finally, someone has grabbed at it. And with a bit of panache. I expect there was some high-fiving in the writers' room when they came up with Ozzy’s line. Let's see if they can keep it going and come back next year with ‘ninja’.

Dropping the actor who played TVs most famous adman as himself into the Hellman spot is a staple double-ironic quotation - it’s doubly coded and intertextual. The ironic, if slightly labored, hi-jinks (I was straining to keep one eyebrow raised for the duration) are a sideshow though. They get their top marks for getting the product into just about every shot and scoring a touchdown category entry point, the grilled cheese and ham sandwich.

I’m still scratching my head trying to decipher the M&Ms offering. The linguist Noam Chomsky once noted that the ever-erudite Michel Foucault, often cited as the most eminent of the 60s poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists, was actually intelligible if you sat him down and had a normal conversation (unlike many of the other French philosophers).
Foucault, whose writing was often impenetrable privately admitted, "In France, you must make at least 25 per cent incomprehensible; or else people won’t think you’re a profound thinker." My guess is that Foucault’s method inspired the M&Ms brand managers. Or maybe they don’t even know what’s going on.

Of course, one thing that all this anti-advertising advertising can’t deny is its own conflicted-ness. It is an integral part of the system it claims to oppose. It ‘reinforces’ as much as it ‘subverts’ the conventions it claims to challenge. And is entirely complicitous with the values it ‘calls into question’.
Yet Postmodern advertising is also non-committal. It merely holds a mirror. In our affected cool post-modern ‘knowingness’ the mainstream has embraced themselves as completely ironic consumers and so we probably get the AdBowl we deserve for now.

Wait until they hear about post-irony…

Eaon Pritchard is Chief Strategy Officer at Bray & Co brayand.co

 

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