I don't know how many commercials were on last night's Super Bowl. I suppose I could look it up but I don't really care that much.
What impresses me about Super Bowl commercials is that everyone--not just everyone in the business--but everyone knows how high the stakes are, how much it costs per 30-seconds, how big the stage, how intense the scrutiny.
Therefore, you'd think, that agencies, clients, marketers, researchers, brain scan neurologists subjected the spots that ran last night to all sorts of testing regimen. Was there a single spot that ran last night that didn't test well?
Assuming that's the case, why were so many just bad? Boring, loud, rip-offs, dumb, incomplete, non-persuasive?
My guess is that if you did research on research you'd find that research is right about what it's researching about 50% of the time.
In other words, the spots last night tested well, but the tests themselves probably didn't.
There's an old Latin-ism translated as "Who will guard the guards themselves."
Who tests the testers?
