Look, I don’t

want to be all “if you only watch one major sporting event per year, perhaps your opinions on the ads running during them are inevitably going to be shallow and trite,” but here’s the deal: the only TV programs men watch (in any great number) are sports. That is not a stereotype: that is a Nielson-certified factoid. What that means is that, if you want to reach a male demographic with a TV ad, the only choice you have is to reach to all of it at once. And that necessarily means that you have to shoot for the lowest common denom-nom-nom-inator. With women, advertisers have the luxury of both assuming they are going to be exposed to multiple media streams (so they can spread out a bunch of subtler ads over disparate programming and go for a cumulative effect) and being able to target women by their rough taste group. And so you can run ads that “make sense” more, in that an ad run during Oprah makes sense for that audience and an ad run during The Rachel Zoe Project makes sense for that audience, which somehow seems less insulting? But with men, you have no such luxuries. Advertisers have to run extremely blatant ads that sacrifice any hope of getting niche demographics by pandering as hard as possible to the largest demographic. Which means basically Dane Cook jokes in ad form.
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