Cards Against Humanity mocks Super Bowl marketing culture with a potato marked ‘advertisement’
Super Bowl ads provide brands the chance to gain exposure to one of the largest, engaged audiences available but the media space comes for a price (somewhere upwards of $5m for 30 seconds).
Irreverent party game Cards Against Humanity has decided to parody the ad culture around the Super Bowl in its new video ‘Potato’ (which did not actually air during the big game).
The company took to Medium to give a (fake) breakdown of its marketing plans for the big day, to explain why it was not among the brand winners likes Netflix, T-Mobile and Mr Clean.
It claimed Wieden+Kennedy “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. Eventually, we realized that they were burdened by conventional thinking and fired them, but this left us with only 48 hours to complete the ad".
After “sacking” the agency, the group found that the potato is the most commonly consumed vegetable, favoured by US consumers.
In a breakdown of why a bland video of a potato marked ‘advertisment’ failed to generate the buzz of some of these brands, CAH said: “There are just some things you can’t control. We assumed that potatoes would feature more prominently in this year’s Super Bowl. However, no players were shown eating a potato, and potatoes were not mentioned at all during the game. We gambled big and lost.”
Read the full dissection of the campaign here, there’s some compelling findings for marketers.