Super Bowl an ad fest

Ages ago, when consumers were still known as people, the Super Bowl was a sports event.

Then Master Lock shot a bullet at a lock on a commercial during the 1974 game, and things changed. The Master Lock ad, putting a brand logo front and center in a blunt, right-between-the-eyes campaign, ran more or less unchanged for the next 21 Super Bowls.

Slowly, the ads evolved into minimovies with escalating production budgets to match. Fans started voting on commercial favorites, and the buzz surrounding the spots gave them an afterlife.

By the time Apple introduced its Macintosh with the brilliant, cinematic "1984" commercial by filmmaker Ridley Scott, the advertising was watched as closely as the game.

As it became an annual bacchanal of media overkill, Super Bowl Sunday emerged as more than a TV event. It became the top secular holiday on the national calendar.

"Most studies show it's the biggest common event in American society, including other holidays," said Pennsylvania State professor Mark Dyreson, who co-wrote the chapter "Super Bowl Sunday: A New American Holiday?" for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Holidays.

Because it is the rare TV event that cuts across gender, age, race and cultural lines, the Super Bowl is more than a ratings phenomenon. It is a pop-cultural institution.

The telecast expanded to a daylong, then a weekend-long fest. The networks learned to launch new shows in the postgame spot. "Grey's Anatomy" premiered before some 38 million viewers on ABC in 2005.

Halftime marching bands gave way to spectaculars with the likes of the Rolling Stones, Prince, U2 and Michael Jackson (the latter performed with 3,500 local children and as many jokes from cynics).

Now a national observance, Super Bowl Sunday is second only to Thanksgiving in terms of food consumption — a day on which the California Avocado Commission says Americans will scarf nearly 50 million pounds of avocados.

Viewers have endless choices in this fragmented, multiplatform entertainment world, yet the Super Bowl telecast remains the rare TV event that can amass more than 90 million Americans at once. Only "American Idol" and, if we're lucky, the Oscars can hope to draw more than 35 million viewers these days.

"It's the largest national event, at least in terms of people doing a common thing at one time in American culture," according to Penn State's Dyreson.