Thankfully, our head of marketing Jon Hunt identified the fragments of a good idea in the mental wreckage I had sent along, and he suggested that we make a real ad but only buy it in a small market — that way we could tell everyone we’d run a Super Bowl ad, but spend far less money. When he told me that a 30-second ad during the first quarter of the game only cost $700 in Helena, Montana, I knew we were in. (Other options: Tulsa, Oklahoma, for $12,500; Fairbanks, Alaska, for $3,000; and Missoula, Montana, for $2,200.)
I was at the airport waiting for my flight home from CES — exhausted, sick, and not a little partied out from a week in Vegas. Delirious, in other words. And as I waited to board, I watched and re-watched the latest video from our outstanding video team, in which 257 gadgets fly by in just three minutes, with Dieter narrating from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
The next step was the ad — we decided against running the 257 Gadgets video because it was too heady and hard to cut down to a believable 30 seconds, so we needed something else, and it needed to be believable and kind of crazy. We had an unused pilot for a show called Futureworld lying on the shelf, so we decided to update it with a bunch of new shots, and I rewrote the voiceover to be as generically soaring as possible. We hired a professional voiceover artist to come in and lend the whole thing an air of corporate respectability. It took him all of 15 minutes to nail it. “That was the easiest money I’ve ever seen anyone make,” our director John told me. The goal was to make something that worked in virtually any context; I kept joking we could show basically any logo at the end of the ad and it would work. Coca-Cola. MasterCard. GE. Chevy. The Verge. Cheez-Its.
Then — and this is where the wheels really started to wobble and I should have known they would come right off the bus — I asked John to move the shot of Ross crying in the Gear VR to sync up with the voiceover saying “and even how we die.” We were cracking up laughing when we did it — but I didn’t realize that we’d sent the whole thing so far over the top that it actually started to look like we were serious.
When the ad leaked, I assumed everyone would realize it was fake from the get-go — it just doesn’t make any sense. But everyone took it seriously, and we were off and running. The plan all along was to reveal the truth in stages: first we’d confirm that we bought a Super Bowl ad, then we’d reveal that it was a “regional buy,” and then we’d let it slip that it was airing in Helena for $700. This was supposed to take a few days, but instead it spiraled completely out of control in just a few hours, resulting in Adweek, AdAge, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times articles. Sam Biddle Biddled all over the place. We’d provided so little information when the ad first hit our RSS feed that the media echo chamber had a scaffolding on which to build an elaborate and unchecked narrative about venture-backed media startups, the tech bubble, materialism in an age of ephemerality, upstart teens not having Respect For Institutions, the undying hype cycle that will consume us all, and various other emotions, mostly about Ross crying in a VR headset.