How was your weekend? This weekend was the Super Bowl, so that was fun…and I discovered innovative ways to do things without letting very much water go down any pipe in the house.
The septic dudes should be here soon to take care of things, though.
Let’s get to it.
After the Super Bowl happens, I usually go over some commercials and analyze them just for fun. But I also talk a little bit about what happened in the game itself.
I figured I’d go over the game a little bit today, and try to pull out some things about business from that.
Yesterday was Super Bowl LIII (or 53–yes, the Romans still persist).
Was everyone expecting the Patriots to win yesterday against the Rams? Probably. But they still had to play the game. It wasn’t as if someone said “Since the Patriots are favored to win, they absolutely will, so who needs to even play this game?”
Brady’s first pass in a Super Bowl was intercepted for the first time ever, and he was also sacked for the first time in the post season (up until this point).
There are predictions based on previous performance (the Patriots won their first-ever Super Bowl against the Rams 17 years ago), but nobody knows for certain.
It’s the same in business or writing–whether that’s fiction writing, copywriting, or what-have-ya. People can study their audience and craft, and study what sells. But sometimes the particular cocktail doesn’t work as well as is hoped to pull in sales and solve peoples’ problems.
Overall, this ended up being a highly defensive game with lots of not scoring, and lots of punting the ball back and forth to the other team (for both sides).
At the end of the first half, the Patriots were winning 3-0.
And then it was the halftime show with Maroon 5 (and Adam Levine, the dark-haired dude from The Voice show).
The half-time show was funny to me because Adam took off his coat, and then his shirt too–and kinda donated them to the audience right then and there.
And then that was it. I thought Travis Scott and Big Boi were going to be separate acts, but since I wasn’t as familiar with their music, I couldn’t tell when they were there (just that there were some cool entrances and some dude wearing a massive coat).
One of the announcers mentioned at the start of the 3rd quarter, “The game starts over now, if you’re the Rams. Who cares about the first half?” And we could also say the same for previous business failures or flops. Each project (or in this case, game) is another chance to start over and do things better (provided you were unable to salvage things from the previous project–that’s an advantage business has over football, in that sense. They have replays, yeah, but once the score’s in the books, there’s nothing to be done about it).
The Rams had gotten a field goal in the make it 3-3.
The first touchdown in the whole game was scored by the Patriots 7 minutes before the whole game was over. This game also holds a distinction for that.
That’s why football is a metaphor for success, too–who knows if this book, story, or promo you’re writing for yourself or a client will be a smash? If the Rams could have gotten a touchdown that would have changed everything–and they had multiple tries and fails, just like the Patriots did.
But the part that sealed the deal was the Patriots dude named Gilmore (I think), when he intercepted a pass from the Rams quarterback Jared Goff that could’ve been a Rams touchdown and tied up the game.
So all the Patriots had to do was eat up as much clock time as possible, so the Rams couldn’t come back from it.
So they did–and they got another field goal into the bargain, too.
Final score: Patriots 13, Rams 3.
As fans and as players, we never know how we’re going to get to the result, either, even though football is played the exact same way every time. There are different strategies, but they don’t use massive slingshots or catapults to move the ball, or dig moats to block the other team from getting a touchdown.
It’s just like a story–a lot of stories have a similar structure, but different elements.
That’s also part of the reason I told you the score at the end–it’s exciting going through everything that leads up to the end of the game.
In tomorrow’s post, I’ll be talking about a cool commercial that actually happened before the game–about a store you’ve probably visited a hundred times.
Until next time,
Ty
Fiction and Copy Decoded 