Taxpayer-funded super bowl ad
While we’re talking about super bowl ads, did anyone else notice the ad for the 2010 US Census? The $3 million* for that 30-second spot was funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a.k.a. the stimulus plan. In fact, $100 million of the $1 billion given to the 2010 census by the stimulus plan was earmarked for additional advertising, making for a total of $258.7 million in paid media advertising, according to this document on the census web site.
Anyone know if a taxpayer-funded advertisement has ever appeared during the Super Bowl before? (Perhaps one of those “Just say no to drugs” ads from the 80’s?)
Like so many other recipients of stimulus funding, this advertising campaign seems like a complete waste of money. Advertising Age says the television spots are “misguided, misleading and miss the point.” But at least we can say that this project created jobs…for Ed Begley Jr. and a handful of other semi-obscure actors.
*according to Wikipedia
6 Responses to “Taxpayer-funded super bowl ad”
My problem isn’t with spending TARP $$ on commercials to raise awareness about the upcoming census, it’s hiring the guy who did “Best in Show” to do it. The point of that spot was kinda confusing, and the whole campaign seems equally confusing. But that happens. Just look what happened to Audi. And Audi’s no stranger to tv advertising.
What you have to remember when thinking about whether or not this ad is a waste of money is what happens when people don’t send their census forms in. If people don’t respond, then census workers manually track them down, and that is a very costly exercise, totaling billions of dollars. If running a large ad campaign, including the Super Bowl, can increase the percentage of people who return the census forms on their own even slightly, it contributes a substantial savings to the government overall.
Sometime during Bush II, there was that “if you use drugs, the terrorists win” commercial.
2002 apparently. http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.php?id=181
Fair point, Balta, but a Super Bowl commercial (and particularly *this* commercial) seems unlikely to have much of an impact on people returning their census forms, especially if they haven’t been sent out yet. It looks to me like the Census had already planned a targeted ad campaign which they thought would increase the response rate, and this series of ads with Begley & Friends was just done for the hell of it since they got the extra money.
The question will be whether or not they follow through with the campaign. If they’re willing to use the Super Bowl as a way to kick off a serious campaign, and we start seeing additional adds in the coming days and weeks of the same format, then using it during the Super Bowl could be particularly effective. If they ran this ad and then they go silent for a few months and then try to rebuild the campaign when the census forms actually go out in a few months, well, that’s some poor management, although the ad itself could still have saved money since the differences between the cost of the ad and the cost of tracking people down are so huge.
Post-googling, this looks like a awareness-raising viral video campaign. The Super Bowl ad is the second spot of five Payton Schlewitt’s Snapshot of America videos directed by Christopher Guest for the US Census Bureau. Payton Schlewitt’s Snapshot of America also has a Facebook page and a YouTube channel.