Best and worst of the Super Bowl ads

The SuperBowl was unusually close tonight — so much so that I decided to finally watch the game during the final four minutes. However, for the first three hours of the broadcast, I only watched the ads (plus the Geritol halftime show).

Many of the ads were intended to build a brand image — which works best when you’re trying to create name recognition rather than any particular product perception. I thought Sketchers (the shoe company) and Century 21 did perhaps the best job of making their point, at least for those who did not already know the respective brands.

However, most of these brand building ads fell flat, including Coke, GoDaddy and MetLife. Pepsi ran an incomprehensible ad involving Elton John as a king (why not a queen?) The etrade talking baby should have been spanked years ago, and (as always) the beer ads were ineffective with anyone who was even remotely sober (or who had seen the same genre at any point during the past 20 years).

The car ads were unusually awful this year (including related products like Bridgestone and Cars.com) Toyota and especially Government Motors wasted millions of dollars on ads that neither stood out nor communicated an effective message. Even by the standards of Super Bowl hyperbole, it was impossible to believe any of the claims made by Chevy as they pushed their overpriced subcompact out of an airplane.

Meanwhile, I wanted to like Clint Eastwood’s two-minute patriotic paen to Detroit and the US of A. But despite the praise of the Wall Street Journal, the ad failed Chrysler has gone to that well too many times. As in last year, they should be making better products rather than resorting to “the last refuge of a scoundrel”.

It’s not that the other car (or beer ads) were much better: The VW ad was not as good as last year, but at least better than Chevy or GM. The best car ad was that for the forthcoming Acura NSX, which combines over-the-top humor with two celebrities and a trick ending. (In an obnoxious trend, both VW and Acura don’t post their actual commercial but only an “extended version”).
One of the surprises was the Best Buy ad with various innovators from mobile phones and mobile platforms. Supposedly inspired by the Apple “think different” campaign, the ad was more interesting (and genuine) by featuring actual innovators like Phillipe Khan and Ray Kurzweil.

This was nearly as good as the best ad of the afternoon. One ad that aired during the pregame — the Kauffman Foundation ad “Will it be you?” — offered a testimonial to the power of individuals in a free economy to create new businesses and new jobs. In an afternoon of wildly implausible antics, it stood out with its sincerity and the power of its ideas.

The hubris of the little lie

I was driving to a conference Thursday when I heard a radio ad that proclaims YAAT (Yet Another Android Tablet), the Toshiba Thrive, as being the “most usable” tablet ever.

Meanwhile, for several months we have been hearing: “Amateur hour is over” and “Introducing the world’s first professional-grade tablet” from Research in Motion.

RIM shipped 500,000 units in its first fiscal quarter ending May 28. By comparison, Apple shipped 4.7 million iPad 2 models in the quarter ended March 26, which was a bad quarter for Apple.

So why is it that the makers of the 2nd tier tablets assume that customers will believe the inflated claims of their products? Didn’t anyone think such exaggerations would undercut what little credibility they had? Or are these coming from such overconfident companies that they don’t recognize a lie when they see it?

Goebbels used to brag about the effectiveness of the “Big Lie,” but that assumed that people didn’t have access to other forms of information. Somehow I don’t see that happening for 2nd tier tablet makers.

Photo (June 12, 2011): Research in Motion demonstration trailer is ignored at Del Mar Fairgrounds, despite being astride a major foot traffic corridor.

Super Bowl winners and losers

Another Super Bowl is over, and again my attention was on the commercials rather than the game — as has been true every year since 1995. (That a nice kid from Chico via Cal won MVP tonight was an added bonus for sitting through all the commercials).

One thing I found amazing was all the mediocre ads for which the sponsors paid $2-3 million a pop. Some of these were recycled ads — ones that had already run before. (Why???) Others were just plain ineffective, like anything featuring a Doritos bag.

Fox didn’t have to pay for its house ads, but the opportunity cost was huge as most of them failed. At last, in the 4th quarter the network used its time effectively with two understated parodies. The first was a House M.D. ad that was a knock-off of the famous Mean Joe Greene Coke ad. And then the famous-for-15-minutes star of some show named “Glee” started her ad seeming like a beneficent Oprah (giving away Chevy cars to students) until she confessed she it was a plot to ruin their amateur status. Fox Sports also had some good house ads for its Daytona TV broadcast.

Of course, anyone watching a 3.5 hour football game is going to get burned out on even the most clever ads after a while. But my favorite of the evening was the 60-second Audi ad in the first quarter, variously termed “Release the Hounds” or “Kenny G.” The parody worked on multiple levels, it was engaging, it had unexpected twists, and it had a coda.

I also liked two of the top-rated ads I saw mentioned in various polls. One was the Darth Vader ad for Volkswagen, and the other the Bridgestone “reply all” ad. Both would resonate strongly with techies here in the valley.

Among the ads for mobile devices, the average results were better. In the Android vs. iPhone OS battle, the score was 2-1. While no “1984,” the Motorola ad for its Xoom tablet was certainly catchy, as was (to a lesser degree) the Sony Xperia ad aimed at gamers.

However, when it comes to surprise value, Verizon Wireless beat them all with a very inexpensive ad showing off the iPhone 4 and bringing the return of the Verizon guy.

Still, it was amazing how many lousy ads there were, including most of GM’s $10+ million in Super Bowl spending. (The Lassie parody was the notable exception). Chrysler’s attempt to wrap itself in the flag drew headlines but not heartstrings — recalling Samuel Johnson’s line that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

The beer ads were also surprisingly flat. The exception was the Stella Artois ad featuring Adrien Brody (of the Pianist), outplacing multiple ads by sister brewery Anheuser Busch. (Many viewers also seemed to like the year-old Bud Light “asteroid” ad, but somehow I missed it live.)

Meanwhile, ads that would have been effective at other times got lost in the clutter, including most of the movie ads. With car chases and spaceships and explosions blurring together, it was hard to remember which movie was which, although I recall there was some movie coming by Steven Spielberg as well as movie-izations for at least two cartoon superheroes, Thor and Captain America.

Finally, what was really impressive — impressively awful — was how bad the websites were for showing the ads. I visited FoxSports (MSN), USA Today, Wall Street Journal, the YouTube AdBlitz, Hulu and Spike. I tried to use each site to search, browse, vote and hotlink, but most seemed to foul it up royally.

The WSJ site at least allowed voting, but their format required only one yes and one no vote overall. USA Today was glad to let me vote as long as I compromised my Facebook privacy and spammed all my friends (no thanks). On Hulu, I never could get the vote buttons to show up on screen.

The only site that worked as advertised was Spike’s, associated with the forgettable Viacom cable TV channel of the same name. It allowed me to navigate easily and link any video that I liked. In a few cases, I found official (or bootleg) copies of the ads on YouTube, which at least were quick to find and even quicker to bookmark.

How hard is this, folks? These companies had a year to prepare their website design and most failed the test. It seems like there are some new media VPs that should be encouraged to find other employment.

Update Monday 8:30am: I enjoyed the irony of the Groupon Tibetan restaurant ad (raising money for The Tibet Fund), but did not realize they were doing so as they plan to enter the China market. The Beijing bureau chief of Forbes notes this is 2-for-1 offensiveness, angering both Tibetan activists and their Chinese oppressors.

Stopping others from Christmas evil

One of the functions of free markets is to provide private governance. Self-regulating markets reward good products and services and punish the bad.

However, sometimes buyers don’t have enough information to make good choices. In response, entire companies arise to correct this lack of information — stereo magazines, camera magazines, Consumer Reports, etc. etc. Intermediaries are also supposed to play this role. Reputable retailers, wholesalers and distributors select reputable products and stand behind them.

Of course, this is all fine in theory, but often breaks down in practice. The self-regulators (like government regulators) get lazy, corrupt, or just make a mistake.

And then we have advertising. TV and radio stations accept ads for weight loss programs, male enhancement herbal supplements, and all sorts of products where the “too good to be true” probably is.

All of this being a roundabout way of asking: How much of an obligation does Google have to reject fraudulent ads? Does its promise to “do no evil” require it to avoid complicity in the evil of others?

Do we expect more or less out of a search engine than a TV station, TV network or the New York Times? Does its market dominance give it special obligations?

To me, the Google business model makes it uniquely vulnerable to this problem. Its primary ethos of making its business scalable with no human intervention — and thus no human judgement — seems to be devoted to doing as little governance as possible.

From what I’ve seen thus far, it’s Insulted — and fights back— if the SEO crowd games its algorithms, going so far as to misappropriate the e-mail term “spam” to tar such efforts. It has also taken steps to block searches that lead to malware sites.

However, it seems to be less intent on blocking companies that pay for ads, and then use the traffic generated by those ads to perpetuate age-old examples of deceptive business practices.

All this came up earlier this month when I was Christmas shopping (for myself). My digital SLR is almost 10 years old. My wife and I have been talking for several years about replacing it because the CPU is too slow to take bursts of pictures of our daughter at sporting events.

Back in February, I’d identified the Nikon D60 as the likely replacement, and so I google’d “Nikon D60”. This gave me a lot of paid links to firms offering to sell me a camera, and links to sites offering me pointers to the best prices on a camera.

Virtually all of the sites that I found directly and indirectly were dishonest to some degree: they had no intention of selling me a D60. (The one exception was Amazon, which would be glad to sell me one today).

The problem with the search is that since my research in February, Nikon discontinued the D60 and replaced it with the D3000. So when Target bought an ad for my search, they were gambling that when I came to their site, I’d buy another camera. A few other reputable companies did the same thing.

After that, what was left was companies that had no intention of selling me a camera. Some of these advertised directly, some were listed by a site called Compare247.us and some were even listed by a shopping.yahoo.com search that showed up.
Going to these sites gave me many examples of “too good to be true” prices — because they were. This reminded me of college days when some of the ads in the back of Popular Photography were for reputable mail-order camera stores like Adorama, B&H, Executive and 47th Photo, but among the remainder were companies that were not selling what they advertised or would out-and-out rip you off. (Pop Photo had specific policies for reporting such problems, and over time seemed to weed out the worse offenders).

It turns out that a UC Berkeley alum named Dave Michael (possibly a pseudonym) runs a blog devoted to rooting out fraudent camera website “deals.” (Alas, to monetize all the traffic he’s getting, he created a separate blog plugging good camera prices that he sees on Amazon.)

So when I went to investigate what was known about these “too good to be true” prices, I kept finding Dave’s website, with articles talking about why these sites are dishonest and full of user comments about their own bad experiences. This included postings on Supreme Camera, SmartChoiceCameras.com, Thunder Cameras, and Need4Digital.com. All of these were mentioned by Google or comparison sites linked by Google.

Although Google is the biggest offender, it’s not as though its competitors are blame free. Yahoo Shopping also sent me to Supreme Camera and Need4Digital.com. In fact a Yahoo search for “Nikon D60” this morning (Dec. 24) found another paid ad for Need4Digital.com.

With its billions, Google can’t claim they don’t have the resources to investigate complaints. However, their AdWords complaint process seems to worry about other types of problems. For example, if a competitor is clicking on your page to inflate the commission you pay, Google offers advice on how to report “invalid clicks.” In fact, Google’ing “fraud” on the AdWords site talks about this so-called “click fraud,” not AdWords sites that are fraudulent.

Dave’s site has apparently come to the attention of state and local regulators who have been using it to shut down the most obvious frauds. He has also asked Google why they are not doing more. On October 28, he posted this plea on his blog:

Dear Google: Despite the State of New York’s crackdown, the bait and switch websites continue to pop up, and they use Google Adwords to lure unsuspecting Internet users into their fraud. With that in mind, I have an offer. Why don’t you flag all new applicants to your Adwords program that plan on advertising either cameras or camcorders, and then do some research. If they are brand new, put them on probation. Heck, send me their names and I’ll research them for free. In the long run, it’s better for Google not to let these guys use your service to commit fraud.

So in the end, what responsibility does Google bear for the dishonesty of its advertisers? How much effort should it exert towards rooting it out?

I think it can and should do more. If that means paying actual human beings to investigate the most egregious cases, then so be it.

We’ve already established what you are

I found it really odd to visit the NYTimes.com Wednesday and have my screen taken over by a Flash animation that turned out to be a paid ad. It wasn’t just the animation, or the intrusive ad picture on the right, but the fact that it took over what should have been the New York Times masthead.

As it turned out, the ad was an amusing spot featuring the Mac guy and PC guy arguing over Windoze users switching to Mac.Once upon a time newspapers used to have policies that called for strict separation of editorial and advertising, but as times get tight — and newspapers enter a long secular decline — those boundaries have become blurred. (It also seems to be happening with radio.)

When I saw this, I was immediately reminded of the old joke attributed to GB Shaw, which ends with the punchline: “We've already established what you are, ma'am. Now we're just haggling over the price.”

Aren’t free markets great?

I just saw the latest Mac ad, “Top of the Line”, which is a response to the latest “Lauren” ad of the “laptop hunters” series — the HP ad, not the original Microsoft ad.

Both ads are mostly true — perhaps a little more accurate when talking about their rivals than themselves. Windows machines are complex and prone to viruses, while Macs have limited options available, particularly under $1000. (There is the minor matter of whether or not “Lauren” is a paid actress.)

The Microsoft ads have gone a long way to revitalize the brand, but they still have a long way to catch up with Apple’s ads. Another contributors has been the ad with the precocious 5-year-old (“Kylie”) who discovers that Windows 7 is a heck of a lot better than Windows Vista.

Competition is good. We have competition in PCs, in mobile phones, in movies, videogame consoles, cable news networks. We have lots of competition in higher education and once had competition in local newspapers. Where we have competition, we get choice, efficiency, accountability. With monopolies — whether from private firms, public firms, nonprofits or government — we get none of these.

That river in Egypt

The Merc had two articles Sunday encouraging people to buy a car. The first article, on the front page above the fold, screamed

A New Car?
Are You Nuts?

Still, this story was pretty balanced, at least compared to the other story.

The personal finance story in the business section seemed esigned to sell cars. Within it, however, another incongruity jumped out at me:

WHERE DO I LOOK FOR USED CARS?
You can find used cars on dealers' lots, at independent used-car lots, through private-party advertisements in print publications like the San Jose Mercury News and online at www.mercurynews.com., and through friends and family.

Is this the only way people buy used cars today? Perhaps this quote was copied from an old story written during the last recession.

When I checked Google for “buy car” I got Edmonds, CarsDirect, Cars.com, CarMax, Autobytel.com. Oh, and there are also several thousand cars listed (in just the SF Bay Area) on Craigslist.

The Merc has a pretty educated readership — or at least they did before that pesky Internet thing came along. Are they thinking that denial is going to cause people to forget about online alternatives?

GoDaddy on top?

What was the most effective SuperBowl ad? It depends on how you measure it.

USA Today used focus groups and concluded that it was the $2,000 “snow globe” Doritos ad, which had won its “Crash the SuperBowl” content for user generated content — in this case user-submitted advertisements. Joe and Dave Herbert from Ohio who made the ad collected $1 million for their efforts, and were on the Tonight Show earlier this week. This is also the most popular ad on YouTube.

2nd and 3rd on the USA Today list went to two Clydesdale ads, 4th to Mr. Potato Head — all ads I thought were effective. Another Doritos spot placed 5th, while three of the next four were ads I thought relatively effective: Cars.com overachiever, Pepsi’s “Forever Young,” and the Castrol grease monkeys.

Citing increases in gameday web traffic, compete.com said Denny’s was far and away the winner, with Cheetos, Pepsi, Bud and Gatorade (the big G?) far behind. ComputerWorld tried to estimate the most popular online ads, and their top three were the CareerBuilder ad (which I though crushed the Monster ad), the snow globe and the Conan O’Brian ad that I said was “funnier than his late night show usually is.”

TiVo measured the most watched ads on its time-shifting boxes, and came up with a slightly different list. The Doritos snow globe ad fell to fourth, and none of the other USA Today top 10 made the list. Number one was “Enhanced,” the slightly more effective and less offensive GoDaddy ad that was buried near the end of the game.

However, rewound ads don’t necessarily mean effective ads. Perhaps they are a measure of attention, but (as TechCrunch argued a year ago), they could easily be a measure of an ad that people didn’t understand. Which means they were of below-average effectiveness for non-TiVo customers.

At least TiVo concluded that the ETrade baby was only a one-year wonder. Since he’s outgrown his usefulness, let’s hope his parents will send the brat to preschool to get socialized.

Super game, less Super ads

NBC must be relieved, since yesterday’s SuperBowl was unexpectedly close and suspenseful. I imagine many would call it an exciting game, but not me. Initially I tuned in just to watch the ads, and at the end I was rooting for the old (37-year-old) quarterback, so the final minutes came with a (prescient) sense of foreboding for the Cardinals.

NBC also attracted a near-record SuperBowl audience of 95.4 million, only 2.2% below last year’s record.

On the revenue side, NBC was happy, selling 69 half-minute ads at $3 million each for a total of $206 million. (The missing $1m must be a rounding error). The reason there were so many house ads was they refused to discount. CBS has the game next year, so I’m guessing the discipline was to maintain their pricing power in general or for future mega sporting events.

Once upon a time, if you went to the bathroom or were late coming home, you could miss some firm’s million-dollar promotion. This year, the SuperBowl ads are available online seemingly everywhere.

A Google search for “SuperBowl ads” produced paid links for Hulu, YouTube and MySpace. The ads were also available at the NFL, NBC and WSJ (free to non-subscribers); MySpace seems to be the quickest to navigate. The NYTimes.com has an entire section devoted to the business of the ads. (MySpace is also hosting a cross-promotion for The Boss, fresh off his 12 minute halftime fame.)

There were a lot of memorable ads. This year’s answer to “Herding Cats” would be Castrol’s “Grease Monkeys”. Two ads with memorable twists were H&R Block’s “Death and Taxes” and the Taco Bell ad about the over-eager dater. Nextel’s “Roadies” ad (complete with pyrotechnics) was on the latest in a series of effective ads reminding people about the joys of push-to-talk

I thought Cars.com used its improbable story of David Abernathy to promote its tagline “confidence comes standard,” and Teleflora effectively used its talking flowers to bash ProFlowers.com. Today in class, my students recalled the Teleflora ad, and also the Cheetos ad that exacted revenge on a yakking cellphone user.

Not all memorable ads are effective at selling. I really liked the two Bridgestone I saw — “Taters” (Mr. Potato Head) and “Jump Around” (moon rover) — but they were 25 seconds of entertainment and 3 seconds of branding at the end. Similarly, the GE ads for environmental friendliness were touching — particularly the “Scarecrow” — but given its stock price, it seems a waste to spend so much on consumer ads to promote B2B technologies sold in a few niche markets.

On the pure brand-building ads, it was Coke vs. Pepsi and Bud vs. itself. The best Pepsi ad was “Forever Young” with both Bob Dylan and Hip Hop artist will.i.am. Coke updated its Mean Joe Greene ad with Troy Polamalu, but it was more satirical than touching. Both companies had hits and misses, as did Budweiser, which this year seemed to emphasize the Clydesdales (while BudBowl remains direct-to-web).

In some cases, I couldn’t see why they bothered. The eTrade talking baby is getting old. Unlike the WSJ, I thought Monster.com wasted its money compared to rival CareerBuilder, which had an ad that was both grabby and motivated job-seekers to give it a try.

Apparently I was the only person not to have 3D glasses, so the SoBe ad fizzled for me. However, even without 3D I thought the Monsters vs. Aliens ad was compelling (with the references to Independence Day and Mars Attacks), as was the 2D “Race to Witch Mountain.”

For me, the most surprising movie ad was Land of the Lost — surprising in the sense that I’ve never previously wanted to see any Will Farrell movie. But overall, my sense is that the movie ads were only effective for those already interested in the movie, whether the remakes of Fast & Furious or Star Trek or the latest Transformers sequel.

After weeks of buildup, Gatorade G campaign seems a waste. The black & white was striking, but several of the individuals would have been worth a 30 second spot of their own, rather than 3 seconds in a cast of dozens.

NBC’s house ads were mostly mundane. One of the house ads for Conan O’Brien was even funny — funnier than his late night show usually is. And the use of Alec Baldwin (costar of 30 Rock) to promote Hulu (partly owned by NBC) — with the claim that it was a plot to rot human brains — both parlayed one of NBCs stars and brought some cachet to the 1-minute TV ad.

And what of GoDaddy? They decided to play both SuperBowl ads, but used the less effective selling tool (“Shower”) early in the broadcast and buried the more effective ad (“Baseball”) at the end. In the case of the latter, it was during a crucial break in the action — when if the game was a blowout, nobody would be walking, while in the case of a close game (as it was) the last thing people cared about was a TV ad.

Interestingly, for neither ad was the “Too Hot for TV Internet-only Version” any more racy, just longer. The Baseball ad was padded with more yakking and some of the backstory; the Shower ad added a humorous twist that was the only (semi)genuine moment in all four ads.

Sex sells commodity IT

Sunday is the Super Bowl, and so, among other things, it’s time for another tasteless Go Daddy ad.

Since 2005, Go Daddy has been running Super Bowl ads involving scantily clad women, and this year is no exception. Since the first ad, Go Daddy has relied on claims of “censorship” to draw attention to its ads, but this year the argument didn’t work: two ads were cleared by NBC: “baseball” and “shower.” Instead,the publicity stunt is faux-suspense over which ad will air in the $3 million slot. (If it wanted, it could have paid another $3 million for one of the two unclaimed 60-second spots).

Of course, that assumes that viewers even know what’s being advertised. Of the two, the product plug in “baseball” is more effective, with spokesperson Danica Patrick delivering the pitch near the climax of her conflict with two bimbos. The spot also harkens back to the original 2005 ad theme of stodgy congresisonal hearing, and Parsons has been bragging about his “uncut” version. The (broadcast) ad is the one I would choose.

The “shower” ad shows less but promises more. It’s a lowbrow ad, akin to Carl’s Jr. or the most crass beer ad. Worse yet, the plug is mumbled at the beginning, before the viewer knows what is going on. If Go Daddy happens to choose this one (unlikely), it must have decided that titillation will generate more traffic to the website.

As with previous years, Go Daddy has been doing a good job
of generating click-throughs, using the TV ad (and free publicity) to draw viewers to see the “uncensored” spots

"Viewers have come to expect our edgy Internet-Only versions on Super Bowl Sunday and this year's online video really pushes the envelope," said Go Daddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons.

Once they see the online adds, viewers also see a postroll ad with a $3 off coupon for a domain purchase. Having a product that can be purchased over the Internet puts Go Daddy in an ideal position to translate Super Bowl exposure into action and sales.

As in other businesses, sex sells. Parsons is consciously using sex to sell commodity IT services — domain name registration — where one provider is as good as the other.

I’ve been a Go Daddy customer since the summer of 2005, not because of the sex, but because they were one of the cheapest providers out there and a friend had good luck with them. The same low prices that enable cybersquatters has allowed me to carry 15-30 domains during this time, such as OpenITStrategies.com, MITtoQualcomm.com, and JoelWest.org. Go Daddy has been edging up its prices, so it’s probably time to find another provider for these commodity services.

I’m not so clear why Patrick, the former Indy 500 rookie of the year, is lending her body to a campaign that goes beyond Maria Sharapova, let alone a Chris Evert. I guess Patrick has decided she needs the exposure in her career (and the endorsement money) while she can still get it. As any starlet would probably advise her, in today’s society you need to exploit your looks and celebrity while you can. However, the normal pattern is to work your way up to classier roles: think Nicole Kidman and Chanel No. 5.

For Go Daddy, the continuing use of the same ad theme for five years suggests a lack of creativity on Parsons’ part — being “edgy” has become safe. From using the same approach, the (privately-held) Go Daddy should be feeling diminishing returns by now. Among those who procure domain name services, it has a firm position as the mindshare and marketshare leader. Unlike an Apple or Yahoo, its website creation tools are for techies and not consumers, so there isn’t much upside there.

Perhaps, as with other celebrity CEOs (Mark Cuban or Lee Iacocoa come to mind) Parsons has grown addicted to the limelight and is using publicity stunts to stay there. Perhaps he really he believes the meaning of the Go Daddy brand is controversy, sensational, “edgy” and Bob Parsons. (How is resolving a name to an IP address “edgy”? Never mind.)

Or perhaps like other men pushing 60, the ex-Marine enjoys being surrounded by buxom bimbos. I’ve never met the man, so I can’t say.

Lies, dam lies, and advertisements

A phrase attributed to Disraeli (or perhaps Twain) is “'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

It was the key quote from one of my favorite books of my childhood math geek days: Darrell Huff’s classic How to Lie With Statistics, which (Wikipedia claims) is the most widely read statistical text of the past 50 years. Alas, despite Huff’s wide distribution, such lies (such as truncated graphs) remain popular, particularly in the popular press.

Lying seems to be taken for granted in advertising. People can say things that aren’t true (“I lost 20 pounds in one week”) because that’s marketing license and thus people discount such claims. Still, the FTC has rules that says ads are deceptive if by omitting key information, a reasonable person would be misled. So nowadays the trick is to add small fine print, briefly flashed on the screen.

Even within this context, the AT&T ad of the past several months has been bothering me. It claims “best coverage”. But of course, that’s not true - according to Consumer Reports, AT&T places fourth after Verizon, Alltel and T-Mobile. Call quality is not a new problem for AT&T Wireless (née Cingular).

The footnote says “based on global coverage.” (Of course, AT&T has no coverage outside the U.S., just roaming agreements with other carriers). So for the fraction of minutes used by the 1% of Americans who use cellphones overseas, you might get better cell phone coverage. That’s assuming you’re willing to pay outrageous roaming rates, although it’s not clear how AT&T has better coverage than T-Mobile or a dual-mode CDMA phone. Meanwhile, the claim that a dad will get better coverage on lover’s lane because his AT&T phone roams to London is not misleading, it’s a lie.

The other lie — a new one this weekend that pushed me over the edge — is the claim that the latest Narnia movie is “even better than the first.” The first cognitive disconnect came with the review in my morning paper, which called it cliche and predictable due to hollow characters and wooden acting. However, the weekend onslaught of Disney ads is claiming Prince Caspian is “triumphant” and “the must-see film of 2008”. This is traditional movie hype, but when I can’t read the names of the critics or the periodical on my 26" TV, I got even more suspicious.

Sure enough, the only recognizable publication among the list of favorable “Caspian” quotes was CNN. Except that critic Gorman Woodfin is not a critic at CNN (founded by Ted Turner who called Christians “losers”), but instead is at CBN (founded by Pat , who wants Christians to take over the country). Given the status of C.S. Lewis as an iconic Christian philosopher and the Narinia novels as Christian allegory, the difference matters.

In strategy, we often expect ethical corner-cutting from schlocky little companies (or young high-growth companies like Worldcomm). Here AT&T and Disney are just the opposite. Both are Fortune 100 companies, and Disney is a top 10 global brand, even if the US-only AT&T is not.

So is this ethical decay in the executive suite? Another rationalization that “everybody does it”? I don’t know the explanation, but it’s not encouraging.