SuperBowl LIV: The Year Our Favorite Brand Icons Die
?By Bev West
It seems like just yesterday when the great Chicken Sandwich Wars of 2019 were raging on the front lines of Popeye’s take out counters worldwide. And yet already, we are saying hello to the year the brand icons die. The carnage began on New Year’s Eve when Volkswagen killed off the beetle on the Jumbotron in Times Square during Dick Clark's Rockin' Eve.
In this romantic, misty-eyed, and hyper PC animated short we bid a fond adieu to a populist icon that managed to reinvent itself to suit the American lifestyle for seven decades. Set to a children’s choir singing Let it Be, everyone from Andy Warhol to Andy Cohen and even Kevin Bacon, all painted with the same broad brush, appear on the main streets of Our Town to wave goodbye as the Beetle embarks on its last mile.
A wistful townsperson holds up a sign that reads Think Small. Another, a sign that says Not a Lemon- -all bygone slogans from a kinder and simpler era. Windmills turn purposefully on the hillside. Andy Warhol takes a Polaroid. An interracial couple pushes their child on a swing. The Beetle rolls past it all on its way out of town, offering a final blessing to the future of Volkswagen in a cryptic metaphor that only the producer and director could possibly see. Finally, the transformative Beetle sprouts wings and flies into the sunrise of a new slogan: Drive Bigger.
What? Drive Bigger? THAT is the apotheosis of the people’s car? This is what the most democratic and unostentatious automobile ever built was rolling through town giving its incomprehensible blessing to? I don’t think so! How dare they killed the Beetle for a mediocre coup? I am outraged!
See how that works? People get upset when you mess around with their familiar icons. They are like old friends. People have formed a relationship with them, often in childhood, and they feel strongly when you mess around with symbols of a bygone neverland like that. When people feel upset on this level, they engage with their brand. They demand answers. They want to know why. They make bad jokes. What would people do if you actually killed those brand icons off?
Planters is about to find out, because word out on Madison Avenue is that Planters is about to put their 104-year-old nut in a top hat and monocle, six feet under. The video they released a couple of weeks ago shows Mr. Peanut out on a bro-trip in the Nutmobile with his best buds Wesley Snipes and Matt Walsh. Suddenly, they veer off a cliff, and Mr. Peanut sacrifices himself so that his friends might live.
Not since Droga 5 turned IHOP into IHOB have people taken to the twitterverse in such numbers to express outrage, share their admiration and memories, and make bad puns about their beloved Spokespeanut. Even SNL gave Mr. Peanut a cameo, and made a nutty joke about him roasting in hell. Although the brand chose to pause their pre-game campaign out of respect for the tragedy with Kobe Bryant, plans to inform the world about Mr. Peanut’s demise during the SuperBowl are moving forward. So, during SuperBowl LIV, football fans everywhere will be going to Mr. Peanut’s funeral.
We are all paused now, waiting to see how the world will respond to the first ever virtual memorial for a logo. And at 12 million and change per minute, Planters is betting the peanut farm. At a time when people are hungry to root for a home team that doesn’t start a fight with your brother-in-law or threaten to topple democracy, and join together in some good clean fun that we can share without getting too nutty, my guess is that Mr. Peanut’s remembrance pages will be lit up brighter than the JLo half time show. For such is the potential power of a year when our fondest familiar icons die.