Super Bowl Recap & Industry Highlights: Love, Controversy, and AI Take Center Stage

Welcome back to the Spotlight! Love is in the air around here for Valentine’s Day, which is more than can be said for last weekend’s Super Bowl. For one thing, the Philadelphia Eagles, a team for whom I hold no love, handily defeated the two-time defending champion Kansas City Chiefs. In so doing, the Eagles may have at least temporarily blunted Cupid’s arrowhead and forestalled a marriage proposal from Travis Kelce to Taylor Swift. Meanwhile, in Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show notable on its own for its storytelling and use of hidden and overt symbolism, the artist proved in front of 133.5 million viewers—the most ever for a Super Bowl halftime show—that there is no love lost between him and “Not Like Us” subject Drake. Lastly, and by far most disgraceful was the airing of a bizarre commercial featuring a washed-up rapper/producer (who spent the week leading up to the commercial spewing antisemitism and championing Nazism) filming himself in a dentist’s chair, inviting viewers to his brand’s e-commerce shop that was offering one item: a white T-shirt emblazoned with a black swastika across the chest. How such a hateful commercial was able to air is beyond disturbing, and made an anti-hate commercial featuring Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady that aired during the first half of the game a distant memory. Serious questions need to be answered—and there ought to be a clear rejection by the entertainment industry of this person’s ideas, but for now I suppose I can take a modicum of comfort in the fact there are still some people with moral clarity—the aforementioned rapper/producer had his e-commerce shop shut down and received a divorce petition from his would-be Valentine. Without further ado, allow me to change the crocodile tears to tears of laughter (or at least that’s the goal).

• National Women’s Soccer League’s Gotham FC strikes a sponsorship deal with Unilever’s Dove brand to appear on the back of players’ jerseys. A much more attractive partnership than a similar deal with “Kick Me.”
• Donald Trump, Jr. is investing in a startup seeking to launch an Olympics-style competition in which the competitors can use performance-enhancing drugs. Or as Russia calls it, “The Olympics.”
• A production studio called Promise is offering content development deals for AI “talent.” Long term, such a move is likely to raise its own set of questions as it could have broad implications for intellectual property law, as well as for human entertainers. In the short term, one question I have is how the “talent” celebrates the news.