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February 2, 2020 05:34 pm

2000: The Year the Startup Super Bowl Ads Failed

20 years ago, 11 different startups spent millions of dollars to run 30-second ads during the Super Bowl, reports the Hustle. Within one year 8 of the 11 companies "had either gone bankrupt or been sold in fire sales."The how-to platform Computer.com spent $3m of its $5.8m in seed funding on an ad featuring its 2 founders holding a poster board sign. The site hadn't even launched yet. Not all the ads were quite as homespun. Another startup, Pets.com, spared no expense...to produce its 30-second ad for pet products that featured... a homemade sock puppet... The 11 startups that bought ads for 2000's Big Game were hoping to replicate the success of 2 tech companies that came before them. HotJobs.com and Monster.com paid for ads in the 1999 Super Bowl, and both reported surges in web traffic during the game... [But in 2000] many advertisers' websites proved poorly equipped to handle the increased traffic... One startup's site slowed from 8 to 53 seconds; another's altogether crashed. "Everything was held together with glue and rubber bands," Hanlon, of LifeMinders, said... Pets.com, whose $17m in marketing resulted in just $8.8m in revenue, declared bankruptcy less than 10 months after the game. Several months later, Pets.com sold off the branding rights to its celebrity sock puppet for $125k. LifeMinders.com, which had once been valued at $2.3B, had to sell for $68.1m in cash and stock. Computers.com also sold for an undisclosed amount... [I]n this year's game, there aren't expected to be any startups advertising... According to the professors, modern startups are right not to focus on Super Bowl ads these days: For all but a few, it wouldn't be worth it.... The marketing professors looked back at Super Bowl XXXIV's defunct startups and saw something else: A lot of startups that fell victim to their own egos. Although when it was all over, the Pets.com sock puppet ended up being interviewed on CNNfn.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/1BfaQfFk7mc/2000-the-year-the-startup-super-bowl-ads-failed

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