Here's why a 30-second clip of a potato makes a very bad Super Bowl ad

A 30-second ad during the Super Bowl is the holy grail of advertising. It’s extremely expensive — about $5 million — but it does get tens of millions of viewers, so you better make that time count. 

So what would happen if you used that time to show a 30-second clip of a potato with the word “advertisement” written on it? Well, it’s not hard to guess: failure. Utter and complete failure. 

According to its own testimony, party game Cards Against Humanity learned that the hard way when they spent all their money on a Super Bowl ad slot, hired an expensive agency to develop the ad, then fired that agency two days before the game, and decided to go the potato route. 

OK, it’s probably not all true. In fact, it’s quite possible that none of it is true: While the potato clip exists on YouTube, we haven’t seen it during the game. Some folks on Twitter claim they saw it during the pregame show on Fox, but we could not independently verify it. 

It doesn’t really matter, though, as the best part of this stunt — and Card Against Humanity is known for its stunts; after all, the company once tried to hire a person who is Barack Obama as their CEO — is Cards Against Humanity’s detailed explanation of how it all went down. 

The company claims it has failed on multiple levels. One of their biggest mistakes was taking too much time to choose the perfect potato. Another error was failing to actually mention the product. But even when you screw up on absolutely every level, the company argues, you can at least be the best at failing. 

Its blog post reads:

“At Cards Against Humanity, we believe that you can only become a master by trying and failing. In this way, failure is life’s greatest teacher; failure is actually success. At Cards Against Humanity, we fail all the time. We are veterans of failure. And constant failure, plus unlimited capital, is what led us to greatness.”

We’ve reached out to Cards Against Humanity to find out whether the potato ad actually aired during the Super Bowl pregame — and if it did, how much money the company had squandered on it. But they’re probably too busy filing for bankruptcy to answer.

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