Bowl me into the whitehouse, Super People

I often did an activity with my students where we'd watch Super Bowl commericials the day after the Super Bowl (this one from 2008). We'd vote on their clever wit and argue which sold the product best. Then, we'd take out calculators. For a 30 second advertisement like this, it costs $3 Million dollars. That is $6 million for a minute. Let's say there is an hour's worth of commercials for one football game. That equates to $360 million dollars spent in advertising.

And our economy is in a mess right now, right?

That hour of commercials could pay the salary of 9,000 people at $40,000 a year. It could send approximately 7,200 students to Syracuse University for a year (with tuition as it is)(it could send close to 26,000 individuals to a state, public university for a year). That 30 second commercial could pay the full time salary for 75 people for one year. A hundred thousand dollars is spend per second.

The commercials are great and a true sign of the way our consumer culture works, but we need to rethink the way we do television. I'm not addressing football player salaries...yet...but there has to be away we can rethink where our money goes.