The Denver Broncos won the Super Bowl.
Colonial Williamsburg lost it.
The most talked-about Super Bowl ad was not the Mountain Dew “puppy monkey baby” or the sheep crooning to Queen or even Helen Mirren’s in-your-face ad from Budweiser about drunk driving: “If you drive drunk, you, simply put, are a short-sighted, utterly useless, oxygen-wasting, human form of pollution.”
Instead, it was a commercial that aired on only three markets in the country – Washington, Philadelphia and New York (although the New York CBS affiliate got national viewership because it was distributed nationally to DirecTV subscribers.)
Unfortunately for those of us here in Virginia, it was an ad on behalf of one of the anchors of the state’s tourism industry – Colonial Williamsburg.
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How can a tourism ad be controversial?
Umm, this one showed the World Trade Center exploding into a fireball on September 11, 2011.
You can find the full ad on You Tube. Search for “It Started Here” on Colonial Williamsburg’s channel. The video has logged more than 133,000 views already – and lots of negative comments of the sort that flooded Twitter on Sunday night when the ad aired in those East Coast markets just before halftime.
The commercial is a montage of video images from American history – the flag-raising at Iowa Jima, suffragettes marching for the right to vote, Barack Obama walking down Pennsylvania Avenue after his first inaugural.
All played in reverse, as the commercial takes us back in time.
The narrator – former newscaster Tom Brokaw – intones: “When you reflect upon our sacrifices, our breakthroughs and yes our heartbreaks . . . Where did our fight come from. Our strength. Our heart. Where did our spirit first take shape?”
The point of the ad is, America started in Williamsburg. That’s a pretty compelling point, of course.
The controversy, though, came when Brokaw spoke of “our heartbreaks” – and we see the explosion of the Twin Towers, played backwards.
The reaction on Twitter was . . . swift, and unforgiving.
“Using 9/11 for commercial purposes is as uncool as using Auschwitz.”
“World Trade Center destruction in reverse?? Not cool, not cool at all.”
“Not on board with 9/11 footage for any advertisement of any kind.”
Saturday Night Live actor Tarran Killam weighed in with: “Welcome to Colonial Williamsburg. That’s where we churn butter. And that’s our edit bay where we play the towers falling in reverse.”
Colonial Williamsburg was apparently so rattled that at 12:13 a.m. – how’s that for crisis control? – it issued this statement:
“We understand and respect that some of the images depicted in the ad are jarring. However, the small data point of people who objected to some of the imagery in the ad does not represent the total viewership. Not even close. We have received an outpouring of support on social media for the ad and its simple, powerful message: All that is past is prologue. Our ad is meant to walk viewers backwards through time, challenging them to reflect on how our collective history and struggles shape who we are as Americans today. We cannot forget our sacrifices or our tragedies even as we celebrate our accomplishments. Colonial Williamsburg does not shy away from these difficult moments in our history because they have made us who we are just as surely as our many triumphs.”
There are other heart-rending moments in the ad: We see John Kennedy . . . but we don’t see him being shot. We see a space shuttle lifting off . . . but we don’t see the Challenger exploding in the sky. We see what appear to be the D-Day landings . . . but we don’t see soldiers dead on the beach. We do, however, see the towers in flame.
This isn’t the first time September 11 has been referenced in an ad – though it appears to be the first time we’ve seen footage of the actual destruction used for commercial purposes.
At the first Super Bowl following the attacks – in 2002 – Budweiser aired what was universally considered a very poignant ad, featuring its trademark Clydesdales. The commercial showed the horses pulling a wagon across the Brooklyn Bridge, then halting in Battery Park and lowering their heads in the direction where the towers had fallen.
That ad aired just once – but has played more than 16 million times on You Tube, where viewers have given it a “thumbs up” at a rate of 19-1 over those who have given it a “thumbs down.”
Why the different responses?
Well, the Clydesdales ad seems . . . respectful.
It’s also discreet.
Verizon, State Farm, NASCAR, Southwest Airlines, even the New York Tourism Council have all had their own ads that referenced that awful day – but none showed the actual moment at which people lost their lives.
That’s the crucial difference with the Colonial Williamsburg ad. We all know what happened. Do we really need to see it replayed? It’s as if Colonial Williamsburg had included the Zapruder film that shows President Kennedy being assassinated.
Colonial Williamsburg is right, of course: All past is prologue, and we should not shy away from discussing difficult moments in our history.
Discussing them, though, is different from being forced to witness them all over again. The point could have been made without showing people dying on our television screens. People react differently when they see things – a point we try to take into consideration whenever there is some horror in the news and we must select an appropriate image for our front page.
That’s the point Colonial Williamsburg seems to be missing. It replied to Killam (and, indirectly, everyone else) this way:
“Forgetting is not an option! Every generation has a defining moment. For us: 9/11. Knowledge of history = civic responsibility.”
No one, though, is talking about forgetting September 11; it’s a matter of whether it’s tasteful to show the fire and death in a television ad.
After a tragedy, when someone makes a joke, it’s often accompanied with the question: “Too soon?”
To use September 11 footage in a commercial? The answer, outside of Colonial Williamsburg, still seems to be “too soon.”