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Don’t believe the hype of feel-good ad campaign for Jesus [1]

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Date: 2023-02

In the middle of Sunday’s Super Bowl, the final of the annual National Football League championship and often the most-watched television broadcast of the year in the US, the game was briefly interrupted with two ads for Jesus.

Although the ads have only attracted wide attention over the last few months when they appeared during American football matches, the ‘He Gets Us’ campaign is a $300m (and counting) advertising extravaganza that’s been running nationwide since last March.

Most of the ads display black and white photos, many of people of colour in gritty, modern settings. Emotional music plays as voiceovers attempt to make Jesus seem relevant and relatable to diverse people in today’s world, especially to younger people.

They build up to phrases like “Jesus was a refugee”, “Jesus was born to a teen mom”, “Jesus was wrongly judged” and “Jesus was cancelled too” (a phrase that, especially in the US, indicates a barely coded right-wing political agenda). Each ad concludes with: “He gets us. All of us.”

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Perhaps because I grew up evangelical and am inured to this particular manipulative aesthetic, the ads immediately struck me as essentially phoney.

However, they certainly have reach. The 90 seconds of advertising time during the Super Bowl, reportedly purchased for about $20m, probably reached more than 100 million viewers.

I was one of the first to report on He Gets Us, soon after its launch last year. At first, the campaign remained pretty obscure, and I began to think it would fall flat, despite the initially reported $100m donated to fund it.

But last month, Christianity Today – widely considered the flagship magazine for evangelical Protestants in the US – reported that online videos of the ads had garnered almost 6.5 billion impressions. And in the lead-up to the Super Bowl, the ad campaign was much discussed in the press, particularly following the airing of one of its ads the previous Sunday, during the Grammys.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/super-bowl-evangelical-advertising-ad-campaign-he-gets-us/

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