'He Gets Us' Just Makes Everyone Mad

It's hard to defend critiques of your ad campaign's message when it doesn't say much to begin with.

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“If everybody hates us, we must be doing something right!” the makers of He Gets Us reassure themselves as they shovel another 100 million dollars into the furnace. That sums up aftermath of the big Super Bowl ad that was hoping to finally get the word out there about Jesus.

Last year, I wrote about why I find the idea of Ad Campaigns for Jesus so distasteful in the first place, and I think that piece has aged pretty well. “Having rather dramatically failed to be the hands and feet of Jesus, a staggering $100 million has been poured into outsourcing the job to a series of ads run by a corporate subsidiary with the comically sinister name of The Signatry,” I wrote.

Only when rolled out alongside its colleagues in the digital real estate business did it become clear that the problem with He Gets Us is the problem with everything else. Coca-Cola and Ford and Nike and Doritos and Disney and Budweiser and He Gets Us and the damned Draft Kings are trapped in a endless bidding war over our dignity, throwing money at human attention spans by the millions until they can reap the fake plastic harvest of the only currency that matters in the digital economy: brand recognition.

I remain convinced that a TV commercial to tell Americans who watch football about this Jesus guy remains one of the most redundant schemes ever concocted. Nevertheless, the ad campaign hasn’t gone away because the people funding thing thing have an infinity symbol next to their checking account. But two things have changed. One is just aesthetically irritating. The other speaks to some of the campaign’s broader failures.