Here are just two of many examples.

From Monday’s New York Times:

Just as they did four years ago, the Giants prevailed in the final minute against the Patriots, beating New England, 21-17 and giving the franchise its fourth Super Bowl championship — one more than the Patriots — and its second in four years over this generation’s greatest coach-quarterback combination, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady.

From Monday’s Jason Gay column in the Wall Street Journal:

Again they did it in the closing moments, charging from behind. Again they pushed up against the limits. It wasn’t the Cinderella shocker like it was in Arizona in 2008, but the symmetries were abundant, uncanny. A crucial drive in the final minutes. Eli Manning—the soft-spoken baby of a famous quarterback family who often looks as if he woke from a nap—playing cool and unruffled under pressure.

With the win, the Giants are permanently sealed as Boston heartbreakers, like Mookie Wilson and Bucky Dent before them. Again they delivered a final minute gut-punch to one of the most successful franchises the NFL. Five Super Bowls ago, the Giants spoiled a perfect 18-0 New England season. This one was unlikely in its own way: the 2011 Giants lost four in a row, found themselves marinating at 6-6, then 7-7, and qualified for the playoffs on the last day of the regular season.

Ouch.

Nuf ced.

THE CREATOR OF THE WILLIE HORTON AD IS BEHIND ROMNEY’S SUPER PAC SPOTS: In this week’s New Yorker, Jane Mayer profiles Larry McCarthy — a director and ad maker for the pro-Romney Restore Our Future Super PAC. He’s most famous for the 1988 spot targeting Michael Dukakis. The group is “technically fighting a proxy battle on behalf of Romney, but in practice it has become the head warrior,” she explains. Mayer notes that ROF has already spent $17 million this year—more than the Romney campaign itself—and that almost all of it paid for negative ads made by McCarthy’s firm. The whole story: http://nyr.kr/zOmM2c.

Then again, there is no whole story when it comes to Mitt Romney. Just bits and pieces that serve his purpose in the short run.

This was a dismal installment of the Super Bowl Adstravaganza – overproduced, underthought, underwhelming.

Just consider the Top Ten in USA Today’s AdMeter. [Note: The hardworking staff isn't hardworking enough to link to individual ads; you can see them all at the Admeter site.]

The Number One ad, Bud Light: Wego, was just a mashup of previous canine commercials from the brewmeister. The second- and third-place finishers were consumer-generated ads for Doritos, while #4 was the creepy-if-you-really-think-about-it naked M&M spot.

Then come the athletic canine commercials – Mr. Quiggly for Sketchers and the Volkswagen: Dog Strikes Back spot that tried much too hard to be the sequel to last year’s terrific Darth Vader ad for the automaker.

Actually, tried too hard should be the epitaph for a majority of the Super Bowl ads, which often seemed to have too much money for their own good. (Or too little taste, as in the TaxACT.com ad.)

I watched the game with a group of friends who kept reacting to the ads by saying, Huh?

I would then explain the ads to them (because I have no life and followed all the pre-game hype), serving as a sort of closed-captioning for the advertising impaired.

Except it wasn’t their fault – it was the fault of the advertisers who had constructed these elaborate marketing efforts that included social media and microsites and QR codes and Twitter hashtags and a bunch of other crapola that they attached to the spots themselves. (See especially the Coca-Cola polar bears mess.)

What once relied on the element of surprise now has too many elements.

And that’s turned Super Bowl advertising into one big ingrown toenail.

As the Missus often says, All those dollars and no sense.

Today’s New York Times features a David Leonhardt  thumbsucker headlined, “The 2016 Election, Already Upon Us.” It includes this:

A plausible newcomer for 2016, Democrats say, is Elizabeth Warren, who advised Mr. Obama on the creation of a consumer-protection bureau for financial products and is now running to be a senator from Massachusetts (against Scott P. Brown, the incumbent and a Republican hero). She can deliver a punchy case for economic fairness, which has already made her a YouTube sensation. Obviously, she first would need to unseat Mr. Brown.

Ya think?

Here’s the opening day lineup according to the Times:

Deval Patrick gets a little love, too, but only in a gubernatorial laundry list:

Several other governors — Deval L. Patrick of Massachusetts; Tim Kaine, another former Virginia governor; Christine O. Gregoire of Washington; John Hickenlooper of Colorado;Jay Nixon of Missouri — may also be tempted.

And getting Mentioned is a good start.

No more.

Today it’s all about creating buzz and maximizing social media. As one ad exec told the Chicago Tribune, ”The Super Bowl is almost a three-week PR and social media campaign, and you have to think of it that way.”

And endure it that way.

This time around, Super Bowl ads are just a springboard to drive consumers to Twitter hashtags (see Audi’s #SoLongVampires), QR codes, Facebook pages, contests, coupons, microsites, and etc.

And drive consumers to drink.

Hashtag that.

Pretty sharp, although the hardworking staff wonders how many takes it took.

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera today writes an eye-popping piece about legendary Boston journalist Clark Booth’s breakthrough reporting on professional football injuries:

Thirty-six years ago, Clark Booth, a young Boston journalist, went to Miami to cover Super Bowl X. Though primarily a television newsman, Booth was on assignment for The Real Paper, an alternative weekly long since closed, for which he often wrote. His plan was to interview the players about the potential consequences of the injuries they suffered playing football . . .

[N]o one had ever written an article like that before Clark Booth went to Miami. I remember being thunderstruck reading it. D.D. Lewis of the Dallas Cowboys talked about having nightmares and his fear of breaking his neck. Lee Roy Jordan, a veteran Cowboys linebacker, was asked by Booth why he kept playing with a sciatic nerve condition.

“By the time I’m 55, I feel they’ll have learned enough to medically treat me,” he said. “If they can’t, I can accept that.”

Nocera tracked down Booth in Florida, who dug up a copy of the Real Paper story. As Nocera says, it’s a knockout. And thanks to him, it’s back in circulation.

From our Late to the Party desk:

Sharp piece (sorry, subscription required) in the January 30 edition of the New Yorker about the myth that non-judgmental brainstorming is the “ideal [creative] technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity.”

There’s a problem with brainstorming, the Jonah Lehrer article says.

It doesn’t work.

But chance encounters do.

The New Yorker piece provides as examples two buildings that fostered creative thinking:

1) The Pixar headquarters, designed by Steve Jobs, that was “arranged around a central atrium, so that Pixar’s diverse staff of artists, writers, and computer scientists would run into each more often.”

2) MIT’s legendary Building 20.

Originally a 1942 makeshift structure to house the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, “the main radar research institute for for the Allied war effort,” Building 20 became a catch-all after World War II “for scientists who had nowhere else to go.”

By the nineteen-fifties, Building 20 was home to the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, the Linguistics Department, and the machine shop. There was a particle accelerator, the R.O.T.C., a piano repair facility, and a cell-culture lab.

And then something wonderful happened:

Building 20 became a strange, chaotic domain, full of groups who had been thrown together by chance and who knew little about one another’s work. And yet, by the time it was finally demolished, in 1998, Building 20 had become a legend of innovation, widely regarded as one of the most creative spaces in the world. In the postwar decades, scientists working there pioneered a stunning list of breakthroughs, from advances in high-speed photography to the development of the physics behind microwaves. Building 20 served as an incubator for the Bose Corporation. It gave rise to the first video game and to Chomskyan linguistics.

The hardworking staff bets it gives rise to a really interesting book as well.

Does any rational person really believe that the TV industry has not sold out to product placement? Regardless, TV Guide asks the (rhetorical) question in a current piece that provides this answer:

Product placement isn’t new — it’s been around since the dawn of TV and early shows like the Texaco Star Theater. But as viewers use their DVRs to fast-forward through commercials and advertisers start moving some of their budgets away from traditional 30-second spots to other platforms like online video, networks and studios are working harder to hold on to those precious ad dollars.

That means more partnerships with advertisers, both on and off screen. For example, The CW last week announced an online Nikita game sponsored by Kia. But it also means that as they tighten their production budgets, producers have come to rely on “brand integration,” in which products are woven into a show’s storylines, to cover more of their costs (Chuck wouldn’t have survived without a partnership with Subway).

A “marketing entrepreneur” adds this: ”It’s an even greater challenge for artists and advertisers to create projects that entertain and don’t appear to be a sell out.”

Yes, well, the corn is off the cob in that regard, my friends.

Read the TV Guide story by all means, but all you really need to know is this.

Not only is the corn off the cob, the TV industry is eating its seed corn.

Never a pretty sight.

Originally posted on the Newer! Improveder! Sneak ADtack!

And the hands doing the gripping belong to Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski, whose outsized mitts were the subject of a story in Thursday’s New York Times (an honorary local daily by way of its New England edition).

From the Times:

Gronkowski’s Hands Are Key to His Success

INDIANAPOLIS — The legend of New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski includes the most scrutinized left ankle in town, a nickname befitting a caveman, and hands as large as a cereal box. Or a laptop. Or a legal pad.

From thumb to pinkie, Gronkowski’s hands measure 10 ¾ inches — nearly as long as a football.

Graphic:

But, wait – the Boston Globe has its hand up with this this piece:

Giants’ Hakeem Nicks may be a handful for Patriots

When it comes to the tools of his trade, Nicks has a little something extra on the competition

The dead-tree edition of the Globe also includes a lifesize graphic of Nicks’s hand, but for some reason the web edition doesn’t.

Regardless.

How strange is that: The New York broadsheet features a Patriot’s hands, while the Boston broadsheet features a Giants’ hands.

Thursday’s Boston Herald, meanwhile, had no hand in the hand coverage.

Making the feisty local tabloid – you’ll excuse the expression – the hands-down loser in this instance.