You Talking to Me?

Traditionally seen as "the Super Bowl for women," the Academy Awards took a step toward gender neutrality in its advertiser lineup this year.

Absent Revlon and L'Oreal, the broadcast featured the expected retailers (JC Penney, etc.), but also a car company (Hyundai) and a tech company (Intel). And had ABC not objected, it would have included a Web site that skews heavily to cheating men.

OK, perhaps that last one falls under the category of "Be careful what you wish for." But it also fits into a growing trend. What's a marquee TV event these days without a cooked-up controversy about a rejected ad?

Extramarital-dating site AshleyMadison.com expressed outrage last week that its spot was turned down by ABC, and suggested that the network, home of Desperate Housewives and this year's "infidelity Oscars" (with Up in the Air and Nine among the nominated films with cheating characters), was being more than a little hypocritical.



If this ploy sounds familiar, that's because AshleyMadison's parent company, Avid Life Media, also owns ManCrunch.com, which had its gay-dating ad turned down by CBS for the Super Bowl. (GoDaddy, of course, is the granddaddy of manufacturing network rejections, having started the whole thing.)

The AshleyMadison spot, created in-house and currently running on cable, is a terrible (and slightly racist) attempt at comedy, and also tries ludicrously for a movie connection by giving two of the three black actors an Avatar-like blue tinge.

In the interest of getting it accepted, the company ditched the tagline, "Life is short. Have an affair" -- to no avail. (The ad apparently will run during the Oscars in Australia.)

Something bigger is going on here, a trend that turns the expected formula about media convergence on its head. As offline brands try to figure out digital, purely online companies are increasingly using the most traditional, expensive network-TV events to make a play for credibility. Google was on the Super Bowl, after all.

But if these raunchy bit players (Google obviously excepted) really are serious about spending millions on network-TV spots, they need to stop doing their ads in-house and give their business to actual old-school ad agencies in order to get them on the air. How backwards is that?

In this case, however, it's a triple-win: Avid Life received publicity (sorry about that), the audience got to avoid suffering through the actual spot, and ABC got to look like it has some standards.

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