While millions watch the Super Bowl this year, fans in the local area might be remembering their claim to fame.
In 2016, Williamsburg residents found their home in the spotlight of a 30-second advertisement for Colonial Williamsburg during the Super Bowl. It was the first Super Bowl advertisement the foundation had ever created and while there aren’t pictures of the local area featured, the commercial instead showed a montage of images throughout American history.
Viewers during the Super Bowl saw the 30-second spot, but the foundation also provided a 60-second version that could be watched online.
During the advertisement Tom Brokaw, former NBC Nightly News anchor, narrated with questions such as, “Where did our strength come from? Our fight? Our heart? Where did we first become ‘We the People’?”
“We’ve come a long way in a few hundred years, when you consider the barriers we’ve broken, the leaps we’ve made and the courage we’ve shown,” Brokaw said in the advertisement.
At the time of the ad, former president and CEO oof Colonioal Williamsburg Foundation, Mitchell B. Beiss, said the idea was to take viewers backwards and remind them of the journey that created America in the first place.
“The ads are meant to show that the America we know was not inevitable. It took courage. It took leadership. It took pain and sacrifice,” Reiss said in a 2016 news release. “These ads take you backwards, down the many roads and tributaries of America to their original source: the revolutionary issues, debates, acts, and peoples that defined 18th-century Williamsburg.”
The adv was based on the foundation’s efforts to draw parallels between history and current events. In images throughout history, from the nation’s first president to President John F. Kennedy to President Barack Obama, the ad was created to remind viewers where it all started.
“Where did our spirit first take shape and put us on a path to becoming a nation of ‘we the people,’” Brokaw asks.
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