I loved seeing this article pop up around the Internet yesterday about Fox’s rejection of Ashley Madison’s Super Bowl ad because it doesn’t meet the standards they have set for broadcast during the NFL’s premier event.
Full disclosure: I’ve never visited the Ashely Madison site, but I am quite familiar with what they do since I have been a long time listener of the Howard Stern show.
Having never been to the site, I don’t know if it is at all risque, but I do know that they have a product that probably has quite an interesting audience, and probably a lot of them are going to be watching the Super Bowl…and for their purposes that matters little to none. The important thing for Ashley Madison is that they can’t just advertise like a regular company, or even like a normal dating site like Match.com or eHarmony. Ashley Madison has to be outrageous because their proposition to their customers is quite outside of the social norm. And, in this case, taking their message to Fox for a commercial in during the Super Bowl is genius. Because any half way decent marketing manager knows that Fox is going to reject that commercial about as quickly as the Jets’ bandwagon has picked up passengers this week. But, in the larger scheme of things, getting your commercial dropped by Fox brilliantly plays into a marketing plan that has to be unconventional and memorable.
And that it does.