Nationwide Insurance killed a kid in a Super Bowl ad.
Not really. Not any more than Doritos sent a pig off on a rocket pack, again probably to certain death if you pause to consider it.
But Nationwide rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. The company said it wanted to get attention for an important cause. A lot of people, it seems, were so upset that this cause was lost.
A well-meaning Super Bowl ad completely implodes every few years, it seems, and this was one of them.
Nationwide wants to keep kids safe from accidents.
Parents want to keep their kids safe from Nationwide ads.
Now, if you somehow missed the ad, or have cleansed your memory of it, it began with a boy talking about a series of seemingly both real and imagined childhood scenes. Among them — pay close attention — he happily soared across the skies with a jet pack of some sort and sailed in the ocean in a bathtub.
It was cute and engaging, and not at all ominous. So when he said he was never going to marry, it was easy to dismiss it as some kind of wholesome Alfalfa and Spanky thing.
But there was an open second-floor window behind him as the shaggy-haired boy then abruptly explained, “I couldn’t grow up because I died in an accident.”
Cut to an overflowing bathtub straight out of a 1967 “Dragnet” nightmare behind a graphic that read, “The number one cause of childhood deaths is preventable accidents.”
Then there was an open cabinet below a kitchen sink with easily accessed poisons just sitting there, and a toppled plasma TV screen, perhaps like the one you were watching the Big Game on at that very moment.
“At Nationwide, we believe in protecting what matters most — your kids,” an unseen Julia Roberts said. “Together we can make safe happen.”
What the what? That kid was dead? In the middle of the Super Bowl?
“Our intention was to raise awareness of a cause that Nationwide has been committed to for over 60 years, and that’s preventing injuries in and around the home that kill children,” Joe Case, associate vice president with Nationwide, said by phone Monday. “What we found is most people don’t know that preventable accidents in the home is the number one killer of children.
“It was 60 years ago, and it still is today,” Case said. “So we decided to be more purposeful about how we talk about it in the marketplace, and we intentionally picked the Super Bowl to stage an intervention and start a conversation on this issue.”
An intervention. A sucker punch. Same difference.
It certainly did start a conversation.
It started quite a few conversations, in fact.
The first one was at home. It went along the lines of: “Please stop crying, honey. That boy isn’t really dead, and, no, you’re not going to die in your sleep.”
After that, there was a whole other dialogue on social media about how much people hated the ad and resented Nationwide for wedging it into their Super Bowl party.
There was a series of memes about what the boy wouldn’t get to do — see Katy Perry perform at halftime, call for the Seahawks to give the ball to Marshawn Lynch rather than throw the game away on an interception and so on — that spread via Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
The comments ranged from funny to angry. They accused the insurance company of being too exploitative in a crass bid for attention, regardless of whether the cause was good.
“We saw an initial reaction on social media that really didn’t surprise us,” Case said. “We tried to be very careful on the tone of the ad. We tried to strike the right balance. Some don’t like it, but some actually do. As we saw the initial reaction during the Super Bowl, it was skewing very negative. But as we’re moving into today, we’re starting to see positive sentiment.”
Nobody wants to see kids die, and not just kids in TV commercials. But as long as we’re in conversation mode, let’s talk about accidents as a cause of death.
If you look at a chart of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stats from 2012, the most recent completed chart breaking down the data by age on its site, unintentional injuries are in fact a leading cause of death of children from their first birthday on.
And by “from their first birthday on,” the chart is talking about a long way on.
Like all the way into their mid-40s.
Beyond being the No. 1 cause of death for children and young adults, unintentional injuries continue to be the top cause of death for those in the 25-to-34 age bracket as well as for the 35-to-44 group.
And, frankly, a lot more people die from accidents in middle age — and beyond — than in their youth.
After that, the number of accidental deaths remains high, but more people die and the effects of aging increasingly begin to take their toll. So heart disease, cancer, strokes and respiratory problems account for far more deaths from age 45 on.
Still, accidents ranked No. 5 overall among causes of U.S. deaths in 2012.
What drops off far more dramatically than accidents among the top 10 causes of death is homicide, which is in the top five for age groups through age 44 and then falls off the chart completely.
Now there are a lot of things people can do to make things safer for kids. Teach them to swim. Lock up the firearms and poisons. Make sure they can’t get out an open window or pull something heavy down on them. Keep an eye on them. Childproof everything. Vaccinate.
But there’s no way to make the world safe. We’re human beings. We’re clumsy and mortal.
Its Super Bowl attack on unsuspecting viewers notwithstanding, it’s nice that Nationwide wants to show off a website with safety tips, give parents a phone app to help them and stage more than 100 events over the next year to educate the public.
“We can’t solve all the problems of the world,” Case said. “But if we get targeted and focused on one piece of the pie, in this case childhood preventable deaths, we can do it in a different and in a meaningful way. So the Super Bowl was a moment in time to draw people’s attention to an issue.”
Parents, since the beginning of time, have told their kids of all ages to be careful.
They’ve also told them it doesn’t matter what is said if it’s said the wrong way.
Twitter @phil_rosenthal
