Why Our Super Bowl Ad Failed | Hacker News Reader

Why Our Super Bowl Ad Failed

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144 pointsCaliforniaKarl37 comments

This is the funniest thing I have seen in a while. Loving the dig at postmortems. Working at this company must be wild.

Agreed. I make software for or with advertising companies from time to time, and I love this to death.

I see a surprising number of comments on HN taking this seriously, too. This might be one of those rare situations where HN plays the straight man ...

CAH is based in Chicago and my impression is that a lot of the CAH staff has spent at least some time in one or another of the big Chicago-based advertising firms.

One of the founders (Max Temkin) has a podcast with a Cards' employee (Alex Cox) and Merlin Mann (Merlin Mann). It's called Do by Friday. Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1169249168/do-by-friday iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/do-by-friday/id116924916...

Non-American here, I read the whole article and I still can't tell if it's satire or not?

It's definitely not a truthful retrospective of a failed ad (I would be shocked to hear that they were actually going out of business), but it is made to follow the style of one. However, it's simply using that form as a vehicle, not mocking or shaming the subjects of the imitation, so I wouldn't describe it as satire. Perhaps irony, verging on sarcasm?

The ad and the article are part of a single, original marketing campaign, done very much in their style: part spectacular and part absurd.

It's a bit a both, although probably best termed 'art'.

It's satire by proxy in the sense that nearly all 'projects' Cards Against Humanity and the ad in question were, and the prose mirrors the structure of similar post-mortems undertaken by legitimate companies in similar situations. It may have elements of truth (although hard to confirm at this point), but the purpose is to hook the ad (which was context-free) to the cause, and thus generate buzz, speculation, and more analysis. In other words, a publicity ploy intermixed with a pick-your-own-layers of social commentary.

These are the same people that dug The Hole. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/28/cards-aga...

Anyone who watched the super bowl, did they actually air that 30 second ad or not?

I didn't see the ad, but a look at Twitter suggests it was actually broadcast (almough it appears to have been pre-game and quite possibly only in certain markets)

Didn't see it either, my guess is they aired it only local market somewhere.

I'm an American and I have no idea.

It's clearly satire

The article is clearly satire. But it's unclear if the ad actually aired or not.

It aired during the pregame show. Just a potato with the word "ADVERTISEMENT" on it for 30 seconds. There is a chance they only bought slots for Chicago, as a lot of the twitter feeds mentioning it are located in that area.

Had the same doubts... although the ad obviously makes no sense with no company/product name being shown.

Pretty sure it's satire, but as a non-american I don't understand it either.

I don't think it's American-ness that dictates whether or not you get it, but rather your familiarity with cards against humanity, their product, and their marketing style.

Definitely satire, although I was surprised they mentioned a well-known ad agency by name. Just check their past marketing efforts (and the general idea of Cards Against Humanity.)

They're giving props to W+K in a backhanded way: "They wasted over six months of our precious time pitching concepts like people laughing while playing the game, and amusing card combinations coming to life on screen." That "conventional thinking" likely would have worked well and made the ad successful in conventional terms. So I don't think they're dissing the agency (maybe that's not what you implied), but rather saying W+K does well at a different kind of advertising. Non-potato advertising, say.

It's satire.

> And constant failure, plus unlimited capital, is what led us to greatness.

That's the dream right there, boys.

So how is the superbowl ad supposed to work?

1. See potato with no logo

2. Ask nearest techno-millennial what's up

3. Millennial checks Twitter and reddit

4. Reports back with brand name and story

Reading more comments, now thinking:

1. Air ad on cheapest superbowl small market slot to get bare minimum definition of "super bowl ad"

2. Publications and blogs write about weird superbowl ad which brings in the brand name

3. The story about the ad is shared on Facebook and news feeds, making the ad the articles and not the ad

1. Make loads of money from black and white cardboard

2. Use some of that money to pull anti-commercialist stunts

3. Stunts increase name recognition: "Did you hear what the Cards Against Humanity people did this time?"

4. Repeat

It's a limited data set, granted, but we're discussing the ad and it's creators.

Mostly without having seen the ad itself, and nobody has slated the company for revelling in throwing money at projects firmly straddling the ironic/moronic axis, so I guess on some level it was a success.

I am also craving a delicious jacket potato now. I feel manipulated.

I'm surprised people fail to see that this ad might have actually worked. Referring to @thinkloop's comment, this is the very aftertalk the ad was supposed to create. Okay granted, it might not go to the extent Cards Against Humanity was initially looking for but still... The article mentions that the ad was low on ROI but given that the event was held just last night, it might need a couple of days to take off, right?

I am finding it difficult to find collaborating sources. Does anyone have a link to the commercial. Did it actually air ?

The tweets mentioning the commercial could be real - apparently it doesn't cost much to run a super bowl ad in a very small area.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/2/7965777/the-verge-super-bow...

I verified that the tweets are real. I checked out the usernames and all of those with locations easily findable (half of them) were in Chicago (where CAH is based) - so it is certainly plausible they only aired in Chicago.

I think the word you're looking for is corroborating :)

Here is the ad:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gcWW-pN_niE

This is Cards Against Humanity we're talking about here.

1. They planned from Day 1 to film a potato for 30s. Or, had a bunch of "what is the worst possible Superbowl ad you could think of" ideas, and picked this one.

2. I would be surprised if they really hired an ad agency.

3. CAH has realized that if they do wacky stuff, like dig a giant hole, they will get a ton of publicity. This is no exception.

4. #winning, by spending less on a 30s spot in a single market and getting nationwide coverage via social media.

Edit: if it's not clear, I think it is smart. And their card game is fun.

Yeah. SREs that often fail to patch systems because they're in GoLang building their pipe dream ignoring the basics of good hygiene. Or the App Dev that write enough Ruby blocks to create 10yrs worth of technical debt that they can't pay off if their lives depended on it. Meanwhile, their laptop remains unsecured and unencrypted while their I.P. is up for grabs.

Don't hire a CSO.

WHAT IF they did it on purpose? Knowing they were running out of time and didn't have a convincing ad they went for airing a completely meaningless one so that later one they could write this post-mortem gaining traction on communities that are far more relevant for their audience such as HN?

I know it sounds a bit pretentious but that would be a pretty smart move to reduce the damage while preserving the brand overall identity.

"...fans ultimately had trouble making the leap from “Super Bowl” to “potato” to “Cards Against Humanity.” " you're right!!! I can't seem to be able to make the leap, not even after reading the article and all comments on HN

To build on my previous comment [1], and those by thinkloop, it's plausible to me that one of the layers of social commentary they targeted was about clickbait and 'fake news'.

This story itself is purpose-made for viral speculation, which these days also implies clickbait fodder; I can already see the articles in the template of "The True Story Behind the Super Bowl Potato Ad" and "You Won't Believe What This Game Company Spent $xx Million On"; all the while as planetjones pointed out the reporting on the event has not yet been corroborated by multiple independent sources, where those sources themselves are known to have existed ahead of time and are reporting truthful information.

Perhaps this will change as the day passes, given how the announcement was made in the middle of the night, but so far all the evidence of this ever having occurred derives from either the Medium announcement from an account that only contains this one post [2] while their known-good official website [3] (and other known-good official channels, like their Tumblr) are devoid of any such announcement, and the evidence presented in the Medium post itself is a screenshot of some Tweets and a link to a Youtube video [4] (which in all fairness was uploaded by Cards Against Humanity (co-?)creator Max Temkin [5], but not posted on the official CAH channel [6].

While it's possible that the accounts making the Tweets are real and the content of the Tweets is truthfully based on an actual event they witnessed, we've yet to see evidence provided by sources known to not be affiliated with CAH -- which is a different threshold than 'not known to be affiliated with' -- that the ad indeed aired in one or more markets -- one this evidence arrives we will have completed rudimentary fact-checking good enough to report on the matter. Until then, any attempt to 'report' on this situation fails to meet the basic criteria for 'news', but is instead repeating a viral rumour that appears to have been started by either the first-party or an as-yet unverified third party.

I surmise that at least one low-quality report will be made about the story while still unverified -- let alone all the social media buzz that the story will generate in either case; thereby demonstrating how easy it is to manufacture a story; for speculation's sake, the same could have been accomplished by creating a plausibly-named brand-new Medium account, uploading a Youtube video, creating a few Twitter accounts or paying actual people to Tweet some choice lines.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13577181 [2] https://medium.com/@CardsAgainstHumanity [3] https://www.cardsagainsthumanity.com/ [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcWW-pN_niE [5] https://www.youtube.com/user/MaxTemkin/about [6] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcIntWOSU38r6V0YaPLNjRg

American here, no idea what this is about. Moving on.

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