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In addition to being the biggest event of the year for NFL football fans, online betting sites and companies that sell beer and potato chips, the Super Bowl is the biggest event of the year for the advertising industry.  TV commercial spots on the broadcast of the game sell for millions and the companies that buy them go all out to create memorable ads in hopes of creating ‘buzz’.  The impact on sales of a Super Bowl commercial buy is debatable, but it’s definitely a way to raise brand awareness.

Some companies, however, submit commercials that they *know* will be rejected by the network covering the game (Fox TV this year).  They can then plug the ad online as being ‘too hot for the Super Bowl’ and hope it’ll ‘go viral’ which often brings the same name recognition benefits without the multi-million dollar outlay.  Domain name service Go Daddy is famous for this concept, and a commercial from their company that is ‘too hot for TV’ has become an annual tradition.

Most recently, the semi-infamous adult dating website Ashley Madison appears to have stolen a page from the Go Daddy playbook.  They submitted an ad to Fox TV which rejected it.  The network has ‘no commented’ the reason for the rejection other than to say that their department of “standards and practices has deemed the Ashley Madison spot is not acceptable to air on FOX.”  The CEO of Toronto based Ashley Madison, Noel Biderman, responded with the sort of feigned incredulity you’d expect from a pro wrestling ‘heel’ caught using a foreign object:

“We really thought the commercial would be accepted. But I can’t say that I’m surprised.”

Call me cynical, but from the looks of it the *last* thing that Ashley Madison wanted was for the commercial to be accepted.  In fact, it looked like they went out of their way to make sure it *wouldn’t* get approved by the Fox TV censors.  The Ashley Madison concept is pretty sleazy to begin with–basically, they’re a dating site for married couples looking to have an affair.   Of course what is sleazy to one person might not be to another and in that regard Ashley Madison is just filling market demand–they claim 7.3 million registered users.  All are adults who no doubt would be ‘trolling for skank’ elsewhere if they weren’t on Ashley Madison so as distasteful as I may find it I can’t blame the site from profiting from it.  The real source of the sleaze is the millions of people in sham marriages, not Ashley Madison’s role in filling a need demanded by this market.  It’s not any different than print personal ads of the previous generation.

Credit to Biderman–he’s decided to use the implication of sleaze from the media and general public to his marketing benefit.  Rather than deny that they serve a market of unfaithful spouses, Biderman et. al. have embraced it with a slogan that makes it clear what is going on:  ”Life is Short. Have an Affair.”  The company didn’t use their catch phrase in the commercial rejected by Fox TV, but they didn’t pull any punches either creating a clip that suggests (albeit humorously) girl-on-girl action, bestiality and a ‘furry’ fetish for good measure.  And just to put the icing on their cake full o’ sleaze they cast a porno star–Savanna Samson–in the clip.  That gave Biderman the opportunity to suggest with a straight face that porn skanks are suffering discrimination:

“Now that so many adult film stars, including Jenna Jameson and Sasha Gray, have crossed over into the mainstream, it’s disappointing that the NFL continues to discriminate against them.”

For now, it remains to be seen how effective the Ashley Madison strategy will be but it’s definitely a more cost effective way of getting some brand recognition.  A lot of media outlets are reporting it–some taking sides on ‘free speech’ or ‘decency’ grounds but as of this writing it’s not exactly exploding across the Internet.  A quick check of the usual trend metrics–Twitter ‘Trending Topics’, Google/Yahoo search results, Digg–showed no mention of it whatsoever.  Then again, it could ‘heat up’ tomorrow.

Personally, it’s not something I lose a lot of sleep about one way or the other and there are no ‘free speech’ implications at play here whatsoever.  Fox is a business and they’ve got a right to accept or reject advertising as they see fit.  I found the infamous Tim Tebow/His mom ad that soft pedaled the message of a fundamentalist nutjob organization offensive, but CBS had every right to air it.  And Fox has every right not to air the Ashley Madison ad for the same reason.  It offends me that the horse racing network TVG airs infomercials for penis pumps in the middle of the night–actually it doesn’t so much offend me as gross me out–but they’ve got every right to do so.  It’s the sign you’ll see in coffee shops and 7-11′s ‘We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone’ writ large.  Some people are making the point about the hypocrisy since the game could feature either a quarterback accused of sexual assault and suspended for his generally sleazy behavior or a head coach who’s an all but confirmed foot fetish and who’s wife all but certainly makes sleazy videos for fun and/or profit.  But hypocrisy from the NFL is nothing new–they continue to maintain that SuperBowl betting has nothing to do with the game’s popularity despite copious evidence to the contrary.

Besides, Ashley Madison will just do what they did last year and go after the local affiliates who also have a time allotment to sell during the Super Bowl.  They did this in 2009 after NBC rejected their spot nationally and you can all breathe a sigh of relief since they’re just going to do the same thing this year according to Biderman:

“A number of affiliates have already reached out to us about this year’s ad. It will find daylight.”

Here’s the rejected Ashley Madison Super Bowl ad video:

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