GoDaddy Super Bowl Commercial Controversy

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Yesterday, GoDaddy came under fire when people became incensed over their Super Bowl commercial that ended with a puppy being packed into a box for shipping. You can read the story, and access the commercial, below.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ear ... omplaints/

While I obviously think it was a very edgy, dark commercial – and probably a bad idea – I felt the outrage was a bit overblown. People are just getting too damn sensitive over humor that has a high “cringe factor.” I love animals – probably more than I love people – but I didn't think the commercial was as horrible as it was made out to be.

I read about it on Yahoo. I thought it was ridiculous. When I read about the commercial I thought that the outrage would be because people thought it was sad she was selling her puppy or something along those lines, something sentimental like that. I had no idea that people would say it encouraged puppy mills. That's just going overboard. Do they really think somebody will see that and decide to start a puppy mill because "it seemed ok on the commercial"?

This is just another example of people going way too far overboard. As long as the majority of people give in to these senseless protests over skewed perceptions of things then they are just going to continue and escalate. Whenever all it takes is large enough handful of people to complain that something offends them, no matter what it is and no matter how distantly related it is from an actual offensive topic, more and more people are going to start complaining about sillier and sillier things until we get to the point where nobody can say anything without an disclaimer beforehand, and apology during, and a retraction after. It's going to keep happening and our collective sensitivity level is going to seem to be getting lower and lower until finally somebody somewhere will take it so far that people will have had enough and try to put a stop to it, but by then it will have sunk into the collective mentality that all these ridiculous things really are offensive and harmful. It will be too late.

If you don't believe me, try this. Find an absolutely innocuous ad and by stretching out your logic so far that it's about to snap like a 30 year old rubber band, and by playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in a roundabout way, connect the ad to some group or cause that we are already collectively walking on eggshells about. Find a way to say that it greatly offends that particular group because of the faulty logic. Make sure that it's so far out that no sane person would agree. Have several people complain about it, separately, publicly and loudly to the media, saying they represent this madeup group and that madeup group and the other madeup group that has to do with those who are offended. Have a handfull of other people also complain via internet posts and phone calls to the company. Have no more than 15 people do this, and make sure that the groups they say they represent are nonexistent and pretty far out themselves. See how long it takes before it's pulled, or if not pulled then at least in a storm of controversy and the real groups representing the people who you said were offended by it actually start saying they are because they now think they should be.

Thats one of the dangers of all this crap and the rapid increase in politically incorrect words, thoughts, actions, opinions, etc. People will start to hear it so much that even though they really aren't offended they will think they should be and start taking offense that someone is saying something that somebody else said ought to be personally offensive to them, so even though the original unPC thing isn't offensive, it becomes offensive simply because it was deemed unPC.

My little test of this phenomenon will work. I promise. After it does, then you should tell the media what you did and why you did it. Maybe then people will start to open their eyes to the terrible case of diaper rash that seems to be creeping across our nation.

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I'm giving it another shot. We will see.
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Yeah, I don't think people are suddenly going to start selling puppies online and shipping them in boxes. It was edgy, dark poke at cutesy advertisements featuring animals, I guess. If people are offended by that sort of humor, they can always exercise the option of turning it off. For all the outrage I saw over this ad, you'd think it depicted puppies being thrown into a blazing fire. Insane!

I don't doubt your experiment would play out in the way you suggest. I consider myself a left-leaning Moderate, but political correctness has just gotten way out of hand.

Just another reminder of why I never watch TV. I don't have to deal with people getting upset over it. Anyway, I have issues with GoDaddy that have nothing to do with this, and my general response to not liking someone's ads is, "Don't respond, don't patronize, don't go for click-bait, just ignore it." For situations like this, I tend to think that making a stink actually makes GoDaddy happy insofar as, "PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT US!! !! !! !! !! !! !! THEY REMEMBER WE EXIST!! !" Yeah, no.