TOW #17 - Visual Text: Squarespace Super Bowl Ad

In honor of the event that everyone’s talking about tonight, I’ve decided to analyze one of the advertisements I most enjoyed watching during this year’s Super Bowl XLVIII. The ad is for a website creation company called Squarespace that is known for its clean, sleek, and modern designs. It essentially puts the audience in the place of a man who is being surrounded and bombarded with popular internet memes, ads, icons, and trends that become increasingly aggressive towards him. The main idea of the advertisement is stated at the end in a voiceover that states, “We can’t change what the web has become, but we can change what it will be. A better web starts with your website.” Just like almost all Super Bowl ads, this one mainly relies on humor generated by cultural memory and hyperbole.

The ad first effectively connects to its audience by referencing commonly hated internet pop-up ads, like those that state “Your computer may have a virus!” and “Meet sexy singles!”, through their human manifestations. The ad then connects to its audience by referencing other parts of internet culture in an exaggerated fashion. For example, the ad depicts a stay-at-home mom desperately asking for the commercial’s main character to “like” a picture of her baby, obviously referencing those pesky Facebook “friends” that message others with the intent of gaining likes. Additionally, the ad also depicts three college-aged girls with heavy makeup and party dresses on whose oversized lips are puckered up while simply staring into the camera without saying anything at all. This is a reference to the rise of “selfies” and/or the common face that girls will make in internet photos known as the “duck face”. These characters, as well as many other familiar internet icons, form a mob that is slowly closing in on the main character until the scene cuts to him sitting at a clean glass desk on his laptop in an all white room, which is when the voiceover starts. 

I found this advertisement to be extremely effective as it was made genuinely funny by referencing internet pop-culture that relied on hyperbole and cultural memory, and it also accurately captured the often overwhelming feeling one may have simply by surfing the web. By contrasting that feeling to the simple and sleek feeling created when the commercial cuts to the man in the all-white room, Squarespace effectively demonstrated the values of its brand and how it would make your website stand out from the rest of the internet.