The Super Bowl was an unintended byproduct of the television spectacular

Evidence

The success of the spectacular—a one-time event—also had the unintended benefit of making NBC think differently about sports, and in particular, big football games, which were also annual events. And so NBC decided to invest heavily in promoting its broadcast of the 1958 National Football League championship game. As luck would have it, professional football turned out to be a good match for television, and the contest between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants, decided in sudden-death overtime, was proclaimed “the greatest game ever played.” Attracting 45 million viewers, it established the precedent and template for what would persist as another great attention ritual: the Super Bowl. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 475

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what exactly made football a better TV match than baseball or other sports — sudden-death drama, broadcast timing, the event format?
• XREF: Super Bowl as manufactured attention ritual connects to the book’s broader thesis about engineered shared national moments and to Wu’s earlier discussion of event-based marketing. — connects to: The televised event supersedes and substitutes for the historical event it depicts — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 177
• ADDENDUM: The Super Bowl as a manufactured, commercially-driven attention ritual parallels the ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece’s treatment of human-made natural infrastructure — both show deliberate construction of things we treat as organic.

Broader Connections

• The televised event supersedes and substitutes for the historical event it depicts #expands (0.80) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 177