Football has a deep and intimate tradition within the American zeitgeist. On one hand, it’s a children's game with a very simple goal: get more points than the other team. On the other hand, it’s a complex military assignment with infinite strategies executed in front of a gargantuan mob of intense eye witnesses.  Say that sentence three times fast with a mouthful of marbles. It’s very difficult to describe how American Football has affected modern advertising and entertainment. I’m going to give it a shot though. We will discuss its history, some of the interesting things that happened along the way, and then I will attempt to tie it all together and share some teachables that you can apply to your strategy. 

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*I understand concussions and violence plays a role in the history of the sport. In this blog, I can’t find a reason to include it in this specific discussion. If you feel like I missed an opportunity please feel free to hit me up and educate me on how I could approach it effectively. 

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History

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Let’s start with the lesser known league the AFL aka The American Football League. This league existed between 1960 to 1969. It was the first major competitor to the NFL. With it’s creative innovations it is highly responsible for the game we see today. The AFL was formed by a group of eight owners who wanted to challenge the established NFL and bring a new, more wide-open style of play to the sport. The league's alterations included; the use of the two-point conversion, the names on the back of jerseys, and the emphasis on passing over running. In 1970, the AFL and NFL merged, forming the modern NFL.

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The Super Bowl, the championship game of the National Football League (NFL), started in 1967. The first Super Bowl was played on January 15, 1967, between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs. The Super Bowl has since become one of the largest annual sporting events in the United States and one of the most-watched television broadcasts in the world. To give you some perspective the most watched game was Super Bowl XLIX (2015) which brought in 114.4 million viewers, when the New England Patriots won against the Seattle Seahawks.

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The Half-Time Show

In 1992 CBS counter programmed the halftime show (which was on Fox) with the sketch comedy show “In Living Color”.  The Super Bowl lost millions of viewers during that time frame. The next year the halftime show featured the king of pop - Michael Jackson. The reason why the halfshow was counterprogrammed was because it became notoriously boring. The NFL treated it like an afterthought. The entertainment would consist of big bands and the type of entertainment a modern audience did not have interest in. In a sense the NFL owes a debt of gratitude to In Living Color for waking them up to the huge potential of the halftime show. 

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