My Dad’s Super Bowl :10

Every time the big game comes around, I can’t help but think of my Dad’s ten-second Ryder Truck Super Bowl spot.

I might be rationalizing a slew of character flaws and a couple decades of bad decisions here, but it was probably inevitable that I wound up in the advertising business: my father was a Mad Man.

Dad cut his teeth on Madison Avenue at N.W. Ayer in the 1960s, the storied agency that produced some of the last century’s most memorable campaigns, including “A diamond is forever,” (De Beers) “When it rains, it pours,” (Morton) and “Reach out and touch someone” (AT&T). His gig was media, his instrument was television—and he was a true virtuoso.

Even though Dad was a native of Brooklyn, by the early 1970s, the Big Apple had lost its luster for him. Think transit strikes, garbage strikes and Serpico and you get the picture. So he and Mom moved my two big sisters and me from the Jersey ’burbs to the town where they first met—Miami, Florida.

After a stint with Y&R, Dad wound up at Mike Sloan Advertising, a smallish shop known for its ingenious creative. One of Sloan’s clients at the time was Ryder, the Miami-based truck and supply chain company.

And this brings us to the Super Bowl of 1983. This was back when Super Bowl ads really started to matter—the year before Chiat/Day’s startling “1984” ad. Broadcast was still king. Cable was in its infancy, Betamax was battling VHS in the nascent home video market, and the Internet was still the stuff of movies like “WarGames” (which I still think is awesome, by the way).

Dad really wanted Ryder to have a Super Bowl spot that year. But after a series of planning meetings in the fall, it was clear he didn’t have the budget. NBC was charging $400,000 for a thirty-second spot, and Dad had to make about $1M last the entire year.

“What about a ten-second spot?” he thought to himself.

Encouraged, he approached the writer on the account and asked if the new 30-second creative could be converted into a ten.

“No,” was the reply.

(We writers are notoriously flexible when it comes to altering our already-perfect creative.)

Undaunted, Dad went to Mike Sloan himself, who gave the script another look. He decided Dad just might have something.

But now Dad had to sell the network—and NBC wasn’t buying. NBC was selling :30s and :60s during the Super Bowl, not :10s. Think about it. When was the last time you saw a ten-second Super Bowl ad? They’re about as commonplace as snow in Austin. The negotiations went back and forth for weeks, with little progress.

Meanwhile, the agency went ahead and shot the new creative, and the client was thrilled to have a Super Bowl buy. But my Dad still didn’t have his slot. The game was just a couple weeks away—and no one knew the pickle he was in. Dad tells me that the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl were pretty stressful for him, and I can only imagine the insane pressure he was under.

I’m still not really sure how he finally convinced NBC to run the thing, but he did. I think it had something to do with him giving the network a bigger chunk of Ryder’s business that year. Might’ve also been all the extra Hail Marys he said.

In my blissful childish ignorance, all I knew at the time was that my beloved Miami Dolphins were going to kick the stuffing out of the Washington Redskins. Luckily for our family, my Dad did a lot better than the Dolphins that year—and made a little Super Bowl history in the process.