The Top 7 Cultural Moments of the Super Bowl

There’s nothing on earth quite like the Super Bowl. Even the gladiator battles of Roman coliseums pale in comparison to the spectacle of “the big game” and its impact on society and commerce. That’s because the Super Bowl’s significance is beyond what happens on the field. It’s everything that happens around it—the rituals, the artifacts, the language. Together, these and other interconnected elements create a cacophony of meaning that has established the Super Bowl as a hallmark of American culture.

Parachute into the average US household on a Super Bowl Sunday, and the cultural performance of the game’s impact is palpable. You can predict almost everything from what’s going to be served for dinner—chicken wings, chips, nachos, pizza, and beer—to what people will expect to see during the game itself—star-studded advertising and epic musical performances. This is a testament to how the modern Super Bowl transcends the sport and now resides among our cultural milestones like Valentine’s Day, “Back to School,” and Black Friday, for example. Like these and other cultural observations, the Super Bowl provides a tremendous economic boon to?a myriad of industries because of society’s willingness to participate in the spectacle and its expectation. In fact, marketers far and wide actively plan for these expectations months in advance—oftentimes before the football season even starts—to cash in on our collective culture consumption.??

However, if you were to search for the top moments of the Super Bowl, you’ll find no semblance of this impact. Instead, you’d be met with a listicle of athletic achievements in the sport of football with no sign of the cultural spectacle that bestows the event with its significance. To remedy this, let us recount some of the biggest cultural moments of the Super Bowl so that the public record reflects “the big games’” true impact. (In no particular order)?

1. The Nip Slip

The infamous “nipple-gate” scandal challenged the conservativeness of the country, black-balled an icon, and had the Black community side-eyeing Justin Timberlake. We debated whether this was planned or not for months on end.

?

2. Prince Playing “Purple Rain” in the Rain

It was only fitting that the first time it ever rained during the Super Bowl would be during Prince’s epic half-time show all while delivering a mind-bending guitar solo on “Purple Rain,” in the actual rain. His performance set the bar by which we would measure all half-time shows going forward.

?

3. 1984 Was Not Going To Be Like 1984

Apple released what many advertisers consider to be the best ad ever ran. According to the folklore, the ad only ran once during the 1984 Super Bowl, only adding to its novelty. It established a brand ethos for the Apple brand, which would prove to be synonymous with its co-founder, Steve Jobs, and everything the company stands for even today.

?

4. Everyone’s Going to Disney World

Since its first utterance by Phil Simms after the New York Giants beat the Denver Broncos in the 1987 Super Bowl, “I’m going to Disney World” has been a phrase solidified with the celebration of the victorious. It soon became a phrase that people would say whenever they did something worth celebrating. Apparently, Simms was paid $75,000 to say the now famous phrase if the Giants won—the same offer was given to Payton Manning of the Broncos if they won. That sure beats paying $5 million for a 30-second television ad during the games.???

?

5. Whitney Houston’s Star-Spangled Banner

During the 1991 Super Bowl, Whitney Houston offered a rendition of the National Anthem that is still considered one of the best performances ever. We’re still talking about how awe-inspiring her vocals were and how, if only for a moment, we all felt like a united state.

?

6. Snoop Dog Crip Walks at Half-Time

What many thought was a well-choreographed two-step by Snoop Dogg during the epic 2022 Super Bowl halftime show was actually a dance move associated with the LA-based street gang, The Crips. Those with insider cultural knowledge were in on the symbolism, and those who were not were none the wiser.

?

?7. The Beginning of the End for the Dot Com Boom, Pets.com’s Ad

The late nineties ushered in what we would later call the dot com bubble, but Pets.com’s ad during the 2000 Super Bowl would be known as the nail in the coffin that ensured that the dot com bubble had indeed burst. Over twenty years later, we’d use this moment to describe more contemporary technology’s Super Bowl presence, like cryptocurrency.

?

Although only a third of the county actually watches the Super Bowl, almost 10x as many people who watch the NFL during the regular season, it seems as though “everybody” partakes in the cultural spectacle that surrounds the game. We might not have all seen these events take place in real-time, but we have all certainly participated in the dialogue around them. We debated their merit, their value, and their legitimacy as an act of community. These happenings create exogenous shocks to the system, which give our communities—in all their many contexts and factions—an opportunity to come together and create meaning through discourse. This creates meta-text, the stories about the stories, which gives these happenings context and credence. In so doing, it establishes new expectations for community members and strengthens the ones that already exist.

?

Indeed, the Super Bowl is no more about football than “Back to School” is about education. Instead, it is a moment in time when society comes together and decides what’s “in” and what’s “out,” “what’s acceptable” and “what’s not,” through cultural consumption and meaning construction. I write about this at length in my upcoming book, For The Culture, detailing how we might leverage this impact to inform how leaders lead and brands go to market to influence collective behavior. It’s all about culture. You don’t have to be a clairvoyant to predict that Monday morning’s conversations following the Super Bowl will be less about the game and more about the half-time show performance, the best and worst ads, and the rendering of the National Anthem—as they are every year. Why? Because it’s the spectacle of the Super Bowl and its cultural contribution to society that makes its occurrence more significant than any scoreboard could. The more we understand this, the more likely we are to leverage its power.??