The Twins Superbowl Ad

Carl Pohlad doesn't spend enough money for you malevolent bellyachers? Why don't you stick A SUPERBOWL AD in your pipe and smoke it?!

That's right, the Twins made the egregious and pointless decision to drop I-don't-want-to-know-how-many dollars on a Superbowl ad this year. I know it's the Superbowl, and hordes of people in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area are watching, but was it really worth however much that ad had to cost? The point of this ad seemed to be to get fans excited about the Twins new stadium. But the next two seasons are still being played in the Dome of Hubert H Humphrey, so I guess the ad was supposed to get the fans fired up for this season.

I don't know that much about advertising, but my economics mind is telling me that for that ad to be worthwhile, it has to cause a revenue inflow at least as large as the cost of the ad. So shouldn't you be targeting your ad towards people who are less enthusiastic about the Twins? Take those football fans, and make them interested in baseball.. Do that successfully, and you'll have a larger inflow of money than swinging more "hardcore" Twins fans from attending 4 games to 6 games in a year. At least, that's my ignorant and uninformed opinion. But this ad seemed definitely targeted towards the more knowledgeable Twins fans.

Unless you already follow the Twins, you might not have recognized Mauer, Morneau, and Cuddyer. I already spoke to one individual who said "That was Mauer and Morneau, right? Who was the third person?" Mauer didn't even get a close-up, but everyone in the Twin Cities area is going to recognize those sideburns. The non-bandwagon-post-2001 Twins fans also caught the Tom Kelly cameo at the end, but that held no significance to people who don't follow the team. I tried to look into if the license plate "140-HLU", which was used as a plate for the Mauer/Morneau/Cuddyer batting practice, held any significance. The end result was my being emotionally disturbed by the stalking capabilities of the internet.

There is one part of the commercial I appreciated: the promotion of malicious acts of vandalism against Cleveland fans. In three years, we're stepping it up to arson, and you'll be legally allowed to burn down your neighbor's house if he puts on a Grady Sizemore jersey. We're also working on making the act of branding any piece of personal property with the word "Pronk" punishable by a week in the stockades, but the legal system moves slowly, folks.