Mike Bloomberg may be vying with President Donald Trump for attention in Sunday’s Super Bowl, but he won’t be mentioning the current occupant of the White House in the minute-long commercial he plans to run in the big event.
Bloomberg, who is making a national appeal for the Democratic nomination for the 2020 presidential race, unveiled a 60-second Super Bowl ad Thursday that is slated to appear just after Pepsi’s halftime show, suggesting the message could run just before Fox’s broadcast of Super Bowl LIV moves into the third quarter. The spot will focus on the dangers of gun violence, and how Bloomberg expects to make the issue a major one in his campaign.
“When I heard Mike was stepping into the ring, I thought, ‘Now we have a dog in this fight,’” says gun violence advocate Calandrian Simpson-Kemp, a mother who lost her son to gun violence during the ad.
““I chose to devote the entire sixty-second ad to gun safety because it matters to communities across the country and it will be a top priority for me as president,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “Calandrian’s story is a powerful reminder of the urgency of this issue and the failure of Washington to address it. People will be rooting for different teams in the Super Bowl, but virtually all Americans — including people in both parties and a majority of gun owners — support universal background checks and other common sense gun laws.”
President Trump’s campaign is also expected to run a 60-second ad during the game. Advertisers have expressed concern that the political commercials could detract from the mood of the game – and play a role in diminishing the effectiveness of their sundry pitches. Fox is running promos for its own programming around the Bloomberg and Trump ads, according to a person familiar with the matter, in a bid to create a content buffer between the campaign commercials and the usual coterie of ads for beer, soda and snacks.