The Longest-Running Commercial In History

This Sunday, over a hundred million people will watch the Super Bowl. Three hours of noise, of bodies colliding at full speed, of a spectacle so precisely choreographed that even the spontaneity is scripted. But the real competition—the one with the highest stakes—won’t be on the field. It will play out on televisions screens and last just 30 seconds.

A company will spend $8 million for half a minute of airtime. That’s before hiring directors, actors, special effects teams, marketing consultants who know exactly how to bypass your skepticism and go straight for your subconscious. By the time that ad reaches you, it’s a $18 million investment.

Why? Because it works. Because in 30 seconds, they can make you laugh, make you cry, make you feel something long enough to remember their name. They can get inside your head, rearrange the furniture, and when they leave, they’ll have convinced you it was your idea all along.

Now, if 30 seconds can do that, what do you think 30 minutes can do? What do you think happens in 60 minutes? What do you think happens when a message isn’t delivered once, but every day, for years, for decades?

You don’t have to wonder. If you grew up watching television between the 1960s and the late ’80s, you already know.

Back then, television had a formula. It was efficient and predictable.

Black and Latino men were criminals—gangsters, drug dealers, shadows in the background of police dramas, disposable bodies in shootouts. When they weren’t criminals, they were janitors, butlers, junk dealers. Black and Latina women were prostitutes, drug addicts, maids who somehow always had just enough sass to be entertaining but never enough agency to be taken seriously.

White women answered phones, waited tables, or stayed home. If they weren’t housewives, they were secretaries. If they weren’t secretaries, they were accessories—sexy, empty-headed, a punchline with great legs. Asian characters existed on the edges of the frame—martial artists, docile assistants, workers who didn’t complain, didn’t talk back, didn’t complicate things.

Nobody needed to explain it. It was just there. The way things were.

It wasn’t a conspiracy. It didn’t have to be. Because repetition does the work for you. It embeds itself, becomes muscle memory, reorganizes how you see the world. You don’t question the formula when it’s all you’ve ever known.

And now, a different crowd is at it again.

This time, the distortion is DEI.

People who know nothing about it are taking to the airwaves, spitting out soundbites, twisting it into something ridiculous. They call it a handout. They call it unfair. They act as if opportunity is a finite resource—like there’s only so much to go around, and if someone gets a shot, someone else must be losing one.

The message is old. The language is new.

They don’t have to say out loud that Black and Latino professionals must not be qualified. The silence does the heavy lifting. They just need to plant the idea, let their audience fill in the blanks.

If companies are making an effort to include more people, those people must not have earned it. How could they?

The ignorance is staggering. The repetition is worse.

Because this is how you shape perception. The same way television once slotted people into roles—criminal, maid, sidekick—DEI is now framed as a charity case, a giveaway, a reward for the undeserving. And if you repeat something enough times, people start believing it.

What they won’t say—what they refuse to admit—is that DEI isn’t about handouts. It’s about correcting the distortions that should never have been there in the first place. It’s about recognizing that teams, companies, institutions function best when they aren’t built to exclude, when they aren’t afraid of different perspectives, different voices, different ways of thinking.

DEI doesn’t lower standards. It raises them. It ensures that the best ideas rise, that the best talent gets recognized, that people are valued for what they bring—not dismissed because of what others have been conditioned to believe about them.

But that’s not the message being sold.

The same people who once saw a world of criminals and maids on television now see DEI and think “unearned.”

It’s the same lie, remastered for a new audience.

It's the longest-running commercial in history.