Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A reporter gets an idea in his/her head that’s fun (racy advertisements!), pitches it to an editor who gets excited because it’ll get lots of readers (Super Bowl ads!), and the story proceeds to be written despite a) the reporter not knowing what the hell he/she is talking about, and/or b) the reporter misstating or completely making up statistics.

Yay journalism!

The only reason I’m mentioning this is the AP (specifically, Ryan Nakashima) is running a story about Super Bowl ads that’s … well, wrong.

We’ll begin where we usually do: at the beginning. Lede:

GoDaddy.com was almost unheard of six years ago. Then it ran the most talked-about ad of Super Bowl XXXIX — a spoof of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” in which a busty woman appears before a censorship board and a strap breaks on her skimpy top.

An interesting lede, states the premise and gets people hooked … oh, and it has absolutely no basis in objective reality.

Unfortunately, the best site for checking statistics (registrarstats.com) is undergoing a redesign, so they’re not up, but DomainTools provides some easily understood stats as well.

GoDaddy ran its first Super Bowl ad in February of 2005 — when “it was almost unheard of.” Except oh, yeah, GoDaddy was actually the biggest registrar in the world at the time. Oops. But the reporter hadn’t heard of it, so that’s different, right?

“But wait,” say the depressing people who steadfastly believe the AP knows what the hell it’s talking about. “That could just mean the ad was SUPER EFFECTIVE in the three months after it aired before the end of the fiscal year.”

That’s a great hypothesis, mindless drone. Let’s go to the data to prove how smart you are.

In 2004, GoDaddy was No. 2 in the world, behind Network Solutions, with 5,777,923 domains to 6,930,906, for a difference of of about 1,152,000.

So yeah. Not so much “unknown.”

I don’t blame GoDaddy’s founder for pumping up the reporter about this — after all, the story is basically free advertising. (But not at the Super Bowl! How will we account for this in the statistics?!) I do, however, blame the reporter for being a moron.

The ad, [homeaway.com]’s first during a Super Bowl, resulted in a huge increase in traffic, which lets vacationers book rental properties. The new business from the Super Bowl ad allowed the site to recoup 60 percent to 70 percent of the cost.

Oh wow, so when millions of people see an advertisement, it might influence them? Thanks, AP! Too bad an ad campaign that only makes “60 percent to 70 percent” of what it cost is generally considered to be a COLOSSAL FAILURE, since it costs you more money than it brought in.

I don’t really have the time/energy to go through and fact-check the rest, but lines like “For other big brands, the link between sales and awareness is harder to measure” are typically excellent indicators that you’re reading a bogus trend story.

Let’s all thank the AP for sending out this drivel to member papers. God knows we have way too much free time on our hands that would be better spent reading inaccurate articles about things that don’t matter in the first place.

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