Lame Census Commercial Ran $2.5 Million

I don't know if you saw it or not. Maybe they showed it when you took a potty break and didn't get to see what your $2.5 Million bought you?
It was part and parcel of the same lame commercials they ran before the Super Bowl, so there was no real novelty involved, just Ed Begley Jr. and a variety of little known and unknown actors in a lame skit. I've seen high school pep rally skits that were better written.

The main advantage to buying time on the Super Bowl has to do with economies of scale. It doesn't make sense for your local laundromat to buy expensive national advertising, because most of the people the ad reaches would never utilize their product, so the ad would never pay for itself.

Since the census isn't selling anything at all, even if it had been effective, the ad would never pay for itself. Beer? Maybe. A good ad could increade sales. Pizza? A national chain, maybe. But, whenever McDonalds runs a new ad campaign, they can measure down to the nickel whether or not that ad produced any increase or decrease in sales of their product. How does the Federal government propose to determine whether or not this ad campaign increased participation in the census? Any at all? Will this be the same as "jobs created or saved", another meaningless metric that cannot be proved or disproved?

A screen capture of the ad can be seen below:


Do you think the people of the US got their $2.5 Million worth with that?
Me neither!