This Sunday is, of course, Super Bowl XIL, the annual national championship of pro football that more than 40 percent of viewers will be watching for the commercials.
In anticipation of the Big Game, plenty of ad people are talking about the commercials, and following the game, basically all people will be talking about the commercials, but I’m not here to talk about the commercials. I’m here to talk about one commercial.
The first one.
Now, many people, if asked what they’d consider to be the first Super Bowl commercial, would name Ridley Scott’s iconic “1984” ad for Apple. And that can comfortably be called the first Super Bowl ad of the modern age. It laid the path for the parade of high-concept, high-production value, super-high-budget ads that would become a beloved part of the Super Bowl viewing experience. You could also name the first big-budget ad with celebrity endorsers, which could arguably be the 1973 Noxzema spot that paired Joe Namath and Farrah Fawcett in an ad so innuendo-laden you’d feel uncomfortable watching it with your parents in the room.
But we’re talking the first first.
January 15, 1967.
Super Bowl I.
The Super Bowl of Non-Super Bowl Ads
Technically, it wasn’t Super Bowl I. Back then, it was just the AFL-NFL World Championship Game — it wouldn’t gain the “Super” title until 1969. Like modern-day Super Bowl games, Super Bowl I featured the Kansas City Chiefs, this time playing the Green Bay Packers. Because it wasn’t yet Super, it was basically treated as a game like any other game, albeit broadcast on both CBS and NBC, each with their own announcers, because at the time CBS had the right to NFL games and NBC had the rights to AFL games.
(Fun fact: Both networks later wiped and taped over their broadcast tapes, ‘cause tape was expensive, and the only known recording is from an engineer in Scranton, Pennsylvania, named Martin Haupt, who had the technology to record it before VCRs were invented. He missed the halftime show and part of the third quarter, so, like, thanks a heap, Marty.)
Of course, brands weren’t making specific Super Bowl ads yet, on account of there not being a Super Bowl, so advertisers just aired whatever they currently had in rotation. A 30-second ad spot ran $37,500 (nearly $360,000 in Today Dollars, but still nowhere close to the $4.5 million that will be doled out for each ad this coming Sunday). And the ads were… of the time.
I will caveat that I wasn’t able to find record of what precisely the first Super Bowl commercial was, as in the one that aired in the first ad break after kickoff or whatever. It might have been this absolute banger from Tang. But I’m going to give pride of place to this Goodyear ad, because a) a recording of it exists, and b) it’s probably the 1967est ad not to include cigarettes or alcohol.
When there’s no man around, Goodyear should be.
Men, your woman could be clutching her fur coat, walking nervously through what sounds like a darkened wind tunnel to the nearest phone booth*. Or she could be driving along, smiling, because it’s 1967 and enforced helplessness dictates she be incapable of changing her own tire but that doesn’t matter because you bought her Goodyear Double Eagle tires.
It’s giving 1967. It’s giving ad-written-for-a-basically-entirely-male-football-viewing-audience. And by God, it’s giving Super Bowl.
Goodyear walked so GoDaddy could run. So this Sunday, remember, as you enjoy the ads and possibly even the football of Super Bowl LIX, that it all started with Don Draper sitting in his office, smoking a cigarette and intoning, This flat tire needs a man.
*In pre-cell phone times, all phones had to be attached to a wall of some kind. Phone booths were little boxes with phone walls in them, laid out in convenient locations in case you didn’t have easy access to your own phone wall. In 1967, making a call in a phone booth would have cost our helpless protagonist one dime**.
**In pre-Venmo, pre-Apple Wallet times, a dime was a small silver coin, assigned the value of 10 cents, used for purchasing things.