Cards Against Humanity and their Super Bowl Failure

Cards Against Humanity posted an article on the failings of their Super Bowl ad. Reading the article made me sympathise with the situation they were now in because of their ad.

The Super Bowl ad was by no means the best and they held their hands up high addressing that fact and ways in which they can improve if they were to submit an ad for the Super Bowl again.

I really like Cards Against Humanity and often play it when pre drinking with friends so I decided to make a brief for myself detailing the improvements Cards Against Humanity wish to make from their first attempt at a Super Bowl ad.

The Brief

First things first, what’s my deadline?

Cards Against Humanity had Wieden+Kennedy, an advertising agency working on their campaign – a very good agency might I add. There ‘write the future’ campaign happens to by one my favourites in advertising. But all was not well with Cards Against Humanity…

They wasted six months of our precious time pitching concepts like people laughing while playing the game, and amusing card combinations coming to life on screen. Eventually we realised they were burdened by conventional thinking and fired them.

This left them with just 48 hours to complete the ad so, it’s only right the brief had the same deadline.

What’s the target audience?

Cards Against Humanity didn’t know about their audience. Out of fear they made the ‘decision to write the word advertisement’ on a potato because they wanted people to know it was an ad, but this thinking is wrong – an ad like anything that revolves around us shouldn’t have to explained, ads are meant to reflect its audience. As human beings we know the sun is hot, the sky is blue and water is wet so as 21st century human also surrounded by advertising. We should know an ad when we see one. Instead they chose a potato as the focal point of their ad which didn’t correlate with their audience and the lack of branding left all confused.

Cards Against Humanity’s ‘ad failed to connect with young people’, (a potato will do that) which is why I propose that should be their target audience for the Super Bowl – a similar demographic to their product.

Call to action?

There was no mention of the brands name in the ad and to my knowledge a potato has not a lot to do with the card game, so I can see why many people were left confused.

Not mentioning the product or brand was big blunder on their part – so I think I’m safe in adding mention or show the product to the brief.

Be creative?

I am a big believer in being innovative, a lot of advertising is the same, they don’t stand out and they bore people but looking at some of the Super Bowl ads I believe they all zigged and zagged to their own drum. A few had quite interesting insights which were more personal than someone liking a potato. Where I believe Cards Against Humanity went wrong is they tried to break the rules without knowing them, and created something that was so creative it was over people’s heads but not strategic.

This part of the brief is to come up with an original idea that isn’t so far fetched it’s a potato and to show in a creative way the brand ideology of Cards Against Humanity.

The ideas

With the brief written and done, I got to work and came up with three ideas – scamped and storyboarded.

I wanted to use TV glitches to show the light and dark nature of Cards Against Humanity. This script mimics the rules in the game – the dealer deals and asks the questions and the others answer with their cards.

When playing Cards Against Humanity there really is no wrong answer. Yes, there are stupid ones, random ones and gross but never a dictionary description of wrong – the script shows this by having the teacher react to the answers on the paper in an animated fashion.

I wanted to use recent rants and or statements that were so outlandish that they would have stuck in the minds of people. I took those statements said by celebrities and changed the narrative using bad lip reading from a voice over using the Cards Against Humanity deck.

What I like about this idea is that is does a good job in being socially reactive, so much so it could run as long as people have dumb stuff to say.

I’ve shown examples of print here but I believe you could easily re-purpose the ideas into social, digital and ambient mediums.

I hope that Cards Against Humanity are apart of the Super Bowl next year because reading their article, learning how they think and what they strive to do is amazing – and it would be great if they could learn from their mistakes and accomplish what they set out to do the second time around.