King Kaufman over at Salon.com has an interesting take on our Super Bowl report, along with pretty much everyone else’s that proclaimed Salesgenie.com’s spot to be the worst received by viewers. The premise is that even though we all proclaimed the ad to be disliked by the vast majority of people (by our measure, a whopping 88%), the ad was still a success, because Salesgenie.com met their lead targets. Now put aside for a minute that their goal of 700 leads out of a viewing audience of over a hundred million makes this one of the most disproportionate direct efforts with one of the lowest conversion rates in the history of marketing (their claimed response of 10,000 doesn’t improve it much). Also take away the long-term damage negative brand perception can have to a bottom line.

What needs to be clarified is what everyone was measuring- we, and everyone else, looked at how the average viewer perceived the ad, and in this case, everyone agreed that fans hated the spot. We made no assumptions about how each ad would affect a company’s bottom line or whether it was a smart use of the marketing budget. The experts were the fans, and another interesting development will be how many of those fans react well to the cheesy guy in a Corvette who tells them he found them via Salesgenie lead.