It seems $50 million dollar marketing decisions can now be made on the basis of winning or losing a newspaper’s ad popularity contest. Yes, that’s right. CareerBuilder has placed its account in review because its ads did not make a top ten appearance in USA Today’s Super Bowl ad poll, a tiny survey based on just a few hundred people with absolutely nothing to do with whether or not an ad affected sales.
Cramer-Krasselt President Peter Krikovich is pissed. Livid. Dumfounded. And steaming mad and tells Advertising Age he responded to CareeBuilder’s opening a review based on the poll by asking, “You have to be fucking kidding me, right?” The agency has resigned the account and will not participate in the review.
In an internal memo to agency staff, Krivkovich wrote, “To our amazement, to our total astonishment, all that astounding business success was less important than one poll. C-Kers, we have to tell you – in our entire history, hell in the history of this crazy thing called advertising, I’m not sure there has ever been any thing as baseless or as unbelievable as that. It’s so ludicrous and they are so serious about that poll it’s almost funny.”
Even in the face of an amazing five year increase in business, skyrocketing job listings, overtaking behemoth Monster and increasing brand awareness by 64 percent, CareerBuilder, amazingly and illogically, chose to change agencies. Granted this year’s CareerBuilder ads were not the best but to make the decision to change agencies based solely on an ad popularity contest is a new low for a marketer. We do hope there’s more to the story but Krivkovich says CareerBuilder told him it was because of the poll. We are not easily shocked by anything in this business but we are a bit stunned a marketer would cite USAToday’s Super Bowl poll as reason for launching a review.
