When Advertising Strikes
There are no Cinderellas…
A recent ad, above, run during the NCAA basketball tournament in the past few weeks aims to dispel the idea of Cinderellas in sports by showing famous “Cinderella” college sports teams such as Boise State (a must watch YouTube video) and Georgetown (alma mater of our own Melissa Biles and Leonora Stevens) practicing hard late in to the night. Cinderella got lucky, these teams didn’t.
I thought the ads were spot on, and gave fair credit to those Cinderella teams for being good, not lucky. The truth is, there isn’t a ton of luck in sports and all of the teams depicted definitely did their share of practicing and hard work to rightfully upset their opponents.
So once this commercial was followed by a CBS montage of number 10 seed Davidson’s run to the Elite 8 that included the recurring image of a glass slipper, I realized that this was an example of when advertising strikes the network. CBS looked clueless and shallow, taking credit away from Davidson’s talent and hard work by attributing their success simply to luck.
And since when are high heel glass shoes and 6′9″, 280 pound athletes analogous?
Advertising may be the lifeblood of tv networks (and pretty much any media for that matter), but in this case, to me, it seemed almost as harmful to CBS’s credibility than, say, a wardrobe malfunction or scandalous GoDaddy commercial.
Other than the lottery and the Lucky Charms leprechaun, when it comes to sports, careers or, say, building a small startup into a great company, it’s easy for other people to chalk unexpected success up to luck… But in reality, there really are no Cinderellas.
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