King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Shockingly, the experts -- that's all of us -- got it wrong on that Salesgenie Super Bowl ad. Plus: College football signing day.
Read more: Sports, Advertising, Media, TV, Football, NFL, College Football, King Kaufman, Sports Daily
Feb. 7, 2007 | When steroids hit the headlines, we all -- not just the commentariat but you there on the bar stool -- appoint ourselves medical experts and chemistry majors.
When it's time to size up a big game we talk about zone blocking and the cover 2 defense as though we really know what we're talking about, which most of us don't.
And every Super Bowl Sunday we all become experts on the advertising business. And guess what. Most of us don't know what we're talking about.
Consider the Salesgenie.com ad. You remember that one. Guy gets out of a red Corvette, walks into the office. A hot co-worker twirls her blond tresses and asks him for a ride. The boss invites him to dinner at the crib. And so on. Someone asks our boy's secret, and rather than mentioning his side business selling meth, he points to Salesgenie.com.
It looked like one of those ads you see while watching "Three's Company" reruns on late-night cable.
The watching world was horrified. The ad was roundly panned. Salesgenie's spot had committed the ultimate sin, evidently: It had lacked irony. The commercial ranked dead last in the USA Today "ad meter," which represented the results of tracking the reactions of volunteer audiences with hand-held meters.
"This spot is so monumentally brainless and amateurish it actually attracts attention," wrote Bob Garfield in Advertising Age, "i.e., is this really a Super Bowl ad???"
"SalesGenie, along with a few of the automakers, rounded out the bottom of the pack with The Most Disliked Ads of the Game," reported New Media Strategies, a marketing consultancy that claimed to gather opinions from "12,000 discussions about the Super Bowl ads from the most influential marketing and advertising, sports-related and mainstream online communities."
Various college advertising and business classes gathered, voted on the ads and gave low marks to Salesgenie.
