About that Nationwide Dead Kid Commercial

The Super Bowl is a big national event, and talking about Super Bowl commercials has become a big national pastime, too. It started because the Super Bowl is so widely viewed, the folks at whatever network is showing it that year know they can charge enormous amounts of money for a 30 second spot.

So, the advertisers started to think, “Hey, if we’re going to pay this boatload of money to air an ad, it’s worth our while to spend a few extra bucks to make an ad that’s really going to stand out in the crowd and get people’s attention.

Pair the incentive of advertisers wanting to get the most bang for their Super Bowl buck with the fact that the scores in Super Bowl games are often not very close, thereby rendering the games not all that exciting, and what we inevitably got was people claiming, over the years, that the commercials were better than the game itself. All this fed into the annual Super Bowl commercial hype.

It’s even gotten to the point now that you can go online to see all the Super Bowl commercials “>Nationwide Needs to Apologize” for springing a traumatizing commercial like this on parents who may have had a child who died in just such an accident.

My first thought, after I considered it a bit, was, “What good is insurance in this case, anyway? Are they trying to say ‘Well, it sucks that your kid died, but at least with Nationwide insurance you can console yourself with a big check from us!’?”

It wasn’t until I watched the commercial again, while preparing to write this post, that I noticed the message of the ad, which comes at the very end, and seems to have been overlooked completely in all of the kerfuffle over the dead kid. The message is that they were trying to direct viewers to a website, ““>Religious and Reform Facebook page to see additional photos and behind-the-scenes comments, and