Superbowl

Okay, take away my man card, I don't get sports. I mean, I enjoy playing football or hockey with some friends and I like to ride my bike or a skateboard, but I really think sports are a bit out of hand. A lot of the guys I work with have been planning their Sunday's around the NFL all season. Now that the "Big" game is coming up, thy are like drooling zombies walking toward the TV.

I'll watch the game. But, I'm certainly not going to celebrate it like a national holiday. I watch it almost every year, mostly for the ads. I am a writer, videographer, etc. and I have always found a lot of creativity (after filtering the brash over-sexualized majority of the advertising) in some of the commercials. So, today as the guys in my hall puffed their chests about who would win I did a little research, on the commercials.

Each 30 seconds of air time (according to an article on MSNBC.com cost $2.4 million. Yes, I said, $2.4 million. That is $80,000 per second. The World bank estimates that 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 US per day. So, if my calculations are correct, advertisers are spending more than 4.8 million people in the world spend on food each day per minute of advertising. Sick!

Let's assume for a moment that there is the standard 14 minutes of advertising per hour during the Superbowl this year. In that time advertisers could have fed 67.2 million people for another day. How long is the Superbowl? Four hours? 268.8 million people.

16,000 children will die of malnutrition in developing countries on Superbowl Sunday. If advertisers re-allocated their funds for that day, what would happen?

The most disturbing thing about the numbers, however, is not simply in what is being spent on the advertising; it is what the people watching will do with the ads. Every company that advertises during the Superbowl will expect heavy returns on their $4.8 million per minute. How much? 100 times or more?

PepsiCo (Pepsi) is one of the leading sponsors of this year's Superbowl, according to Forbes.com PepsiCo expects $34.8 billion dollars in sales and $4.97 billion in profit this year. They are but one of the companies lusting after Superbowl advertising profits. Some studies suggest that it would only take $13 billion US to satisfy all of the world's basic sanitation and hunger problems. PepsiCo alone makes enough profit each year to eradicate one third of the WORLD's hunger. Something doesn't add up.

Okay, now my tirade is over...well, not really. What does all of this have to do with our journey? Here is the point, every time we choose to not buy something new, we slow the growth of these money-eating machines. But saving money for ourselves cannot ever be the point. We need to redistribute the wealth and resources we save to those who need it most.

Lent is coming up, I know that many who read this blog are not of the same religious persuasion as I am, but I think Lent (regardless of your beliefs) can add spiritual weight to our convictions. By giving up something we enjoy and using that time to reflect on our blessings and taking the resources--monetary or otherwise--that we would use during that activity and redistributing said resources to others is a sure way to slay the dragon of consumerism and embrace the spirit of global community.

Thanks for letting me stand on the soap box for a few minutes. Before I step back down, can I make a suggestion? Don't boycott the Superbowl. Instead, watch it with people you care about and gently educate them on how much opportunity is being missed. If only one person begins to think about changing their lives in order to bring balance to this world, it was worth a Sunday afternoon.