Watched the Super Bowl yesterday. It may be the first one I’ve ever watched in its entirety. I’ve never really cared much for pro football, and when I left the St. Louis area for college, the area was still anti-football after running the Cardinals out of town on a rail. Still, I did have some sense of rooting for “the hometown team”, and both teams put on a great show. Of course, the real reason I watched was for the commercials. There was so much hype over the “dot com” ads, but what struck me was how alienating most of the ads were. Football is traditionally a blue collar sport. Both teams were from small working class towns. It may be safe to say that the majority of the television audience was middle class and lower. So why were so many ads about trading stocks and big business transactions? Even with online stock trading, what percentage of the US population actually actively plays the stock market? I don’t mean giving money to a 401(k), but really trading on an individual level. Of course, when the commercials weren’t for eTrade or the like, they were for Budweiser so maybe that evened things out.