Getting Bang For Your Buck: Don't Have A Superbowl Commercial; Get One Rejected

from the much-cheaper,-and-more-effective dept

Wed, Jan 31st 2007 1:25am — Mike Masnick

For the last few years, GoDaddy has had a relatively obvious strategy with their Superbowl ad plan. They basically come up with outrageous ads that they know will never get approved... and then whine about how they're being censored, while putting up the "rejected" ads on their website, guaranteeing plenty of traffic. It's an effective strategy, and apparently they're working on it again this year for at least the third year in a row. However, it seems like some others have caught on as well, as news is leaking that a "porn search engine" (one you might recall from a few years back after it purposely got attention on launch by making sure Google's lawyers threatened them) had submitted a Superbowl ad to CBS only to have it rejected. You can pretty much guarantee the site in question never actually believed that the ad would show on TV -- but knew they could leverage the resulting story into some extra attention.

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20 Comments

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WhatISthis?WildKingdom?, 31 Jan 2007 @ 2:11am

With the news industry more than willing to cover any tiny bit of 'possible wrong doing' or pretty much anything else that seems scandelous, it acutally will probably work.

The primary problem here isn't their using the media like this, it's the fact the news media bothers and falls for it. Ever since the News become about entertainment inside of truth, it's been down hill.

Anyway. I say good for them. People could use more stress relief... Wherever they can find it.
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Sanguine Dream, 31 Jan 2007 @ 5:43am

Not such a bad idea...
For companies that can't afford Super Bowl ad time (isn't the price of it measured in millions of dollars per second now?) this is the perfect way to drum up some attention. The problem is it has the same drawback as traditional TV based ads. If the ad isn't that great then people will just watch once, forget it, and never bother investigating (much less buying) the product in question.
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UniBoy, 31 Jan 2007 @ 5:44am

Rock on GoDaddy!
The ads are not so bad that you would think they should obviously be censored. I think GoDaddy is doing us all a service by pointing out the spectacle of absurdity and subjective nature of the the ad approval process. Thes people are not protecting us from ANYTHING. Therefore, it is a simple matter of censorship.

This country is so out of touch with its own shortcomings, that it now has to have a multi-year controversy and knee-jerk reaction to a naked titty. GoDaddy is not the problem here.
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Ajax 4Hire, 31 Jan 2007 @ 5:57am

I have a GoDaddy site BECAUSE of the rejected comm
I love that commercial on the "Wardrobe Malfunction" and the Oxygen Mask on the censors. I liked it so much I got a web domain and hosting.

Wardrobe Malfunction, I love it.
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Ajax 4Hire, 31 Jan 2007 @ 5:59am

Re: I have a GoDaddy site BECAUSE of the rejected
I got a web domain and hosting FROM GoDaddy.com.

forgot that part.

Still laughing about the malfunction.
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Overcast, 31 Jan 2007 @ 6:18am

Yeah, you'll get your name out to more people in the News than on the Superbowl... lol
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Anonymous Coward, 31 Jan 2007 @ 7:21am

you get what you deserve
That is a horrible line of logic to select your provider for web domain and hosting. Look at what GoDaddy(in conjunction with pressure from MySpace) havedone to one of their own customers (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1542218) - luckily though, you spent lots of time researching the company you are doing business with, and not giving them money because they flashed some titties in your face, right?
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ScytheNoire, 31 Jan 2007 @ 7:48am

i'd never heard about Booble until the news about their rejected SuperBowl commercial. it's a great marketing gimic, get censored to get attention. you tell people it's something they shouldn't see, and every one will want to see it. censorship just doesn't work, it does the exact opposite. no one would even care about Janet's boob, until they made a huge deal about it, then every one was looking it up on the internet.
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Thom Cate, 31 Jan 2007 @ 7:57am

Rejected SB Advertisements
Cost to produce scandalous, sure-to-be-rejected commercial: $175,000.

Price of a 30 second Superbowl commercial: $2.1M (or thereabouts).

Being rejected and having people flood your website: freakin' priceless.
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AZ, 31 Jan 2007 @ 8:07am

Re:
So since nobody would care how come millions called in outrage of what that woman did?
It seems people do care.
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Sean, 31 Jan 2007 @ 8:30am

I do want censorship
I for one do want censorship. Watching such a large event with my kids ages 3, 6, and 9 feels totally appropriate. If it was full of janet jackson boobs and other poor behavior in commercials, that wouldn't seem to be up to public acceptance. It's on national broadcast television...it needs to meet generally accepted standards.
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Anonymous Coward, 31 Jan 2007 @ 9:50am

Re: I do want censorship
can i have yoru guns, your ability to freely practice religion, take away your ability to vote, your right to have search warrents and not incriminate yourself?

sorry, had to be extreme to get the trolls out.

but yes censorship is a crazy issue. what may be porno for you may be "art" for me. ok JT isn't the greatest singer but you catch my drift.

but with the SB being on public airways, the public has the right to say what they do and don't want on tv. this shouldn't be up to a government controlled agency. it should be a PUBLIC one, seperate from gov't. (the whole free speach/press thing keeps bugging me...) this isnt' to say that there shouldn't be government advice and whatnot, but it shouldn't be a part of the government.

society is give and take, to have one thing, you must give up another. it'd be nice where we'd have a utopia, but that's anarchy. because in a perferct world, you wouldn't need government.
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chris (profile), 31 Jan 2007 @ 10:00am

Re: you get what you deserve
luckily though, you spent lots of time researching the company you are doing business with, and not giving them money because they flashed some titties in your face, right?

have you ever seen a tv advertisement?

if people gave a moment's consideration to a product or service, there wouldn't be need for an advertising industry.
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UniBoy, 31 Jan 2007 @ 10:03am

The problem with censorship...
So, who gets to decide what are the "generally accepted standards?"

The FCC has defined broadcast indecency as “language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory organs or activities.”

*I* was not offended by the commercial, and *I* got to see it because *I* was curious, and because the FCC does not (yet?) control the Internet.

Fighting censorship is the only way to keep it from spreading. Kudos to GoDaddy for that!
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Sanguine Dream, 31 Jan 2007 @ 10:32am

????

The FCC has defined broadcast indecency as “language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory organs or activities.”

That is indeed the tricky part. More than likely the ones that decide those contemporary community standards are a select few people who are all part of the same demographic (I'm betting conservative christian white males ages 45+). With no deversity in the group of people that make those standards of course they will be skewed.
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Dosquatch, 31 Jan 2007 @ 10:54am

Re: ????
(I'm betting conservative christian white males ages 45+).

As if. Do you have any idea what these stuffed shirts do on "business trips"? No, no, it's their minivan driving ultra conservative soccer mom wives out to protect their Little Johnny from anything so vulgar as, I don't know, say a perfectly natural biological process, or any musical lyric that uses language stronger than "Darn" (see Tipper Gore for reference)

Conservative males... please. If only this were the case that "wardrobe malfunction" wouldn't have been such a big deal.
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Celes, 31 Jan 2007 @ 11:02am

Re: ????
While that may be true, I'm sort of glad for it. I enjoy "inappropriate" content as much as the next chick. But although *I* would not be offended by such content, it would be more than a little difficult seeing my 2-year-old daughter exposed to it.

I'm not usually one of those "think of the children!" people - but setting guidelines for when such content should be aired helps me control what my daughter sees (like parents are supposed to do).
There's a reason why those commercials for phone sex only come on local TV after 10 pm.
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Celes, 31 Jan 2007 @ 11:07am

Re: The problem with censorship...
That's right. *You* got to see it without exposing others to it who did not want to see it. Nothing wrong with that! But I don't think GoDaddy was "fighting censorship" at all - just doing something they knew would be sensational to get publicity out of it.
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gecko, 31 Jan 2007 @ 11:41am

re: by AZ
check your facts the FCC did not get "millions" of phone calls. They got thousands of emails from a couple of fanatical organized religious cults.
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Chewie, 31 Jan 2007 @ 1:21pm

well
it might be a stupid gimmick by Booble, but they actually are a good site for finding adult content. i guess it pisses me off more when crappy companies use a gimmick 2 get attention, but they are a pretty good site, if U R looking for porn they're good at steering you in the right direction and keeping you away from the shady sites. maybe they will just have to advertise on the half time show's lead female singer's nipple since they won't get a commercial.
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