"In January 2000, the company aired its first national commercial as a Super Bowl ad which cost the company $1.2 million. [...] That ad was ranked #1 by USA Today's Ad Meter and had the highest recall of any ad that ran during the Super Bowl. [...] Although sales rose dramatically due to the attention, the company was weak on fundamentals and actually lost money on most of its sales. Its high public profile during its brief existence made it one of the more noteworthy failures of the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com

If there's one thing the majority of people watching the superbowl love, it's condescension from a corporation.

The US Marines or the British Parachute Regiment heavily promote their status as an elite corps. Advertising for theme parks and even toys often uses the "Are you tough enough?" trope. The Hermes Birkin bag has become one of the most sought-after items in fashion, precisely because Hermes won't sell them to the 'wrong' sort of people.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/12/25/460870534/episo...

But there's a world of difference between "are you tough enough?" and "you're probably not tough enough".

I agree with the GP poster, condescension won't play well.

It's definitely an obnoxious strategy, and it's kind of sad to see. Unfortunately that doesn't mean it won't be effective. After all, we're talking about them here.

Its like a social desirability Catch 22...either way, we lose.

The company is run by someone experienced in running big corp financial loans:

> SoFi is run by CEO Mike Cagney, a former Wells Fargo executive and specializes in refinancing student loans for qualified millennials as well as personal loans.

So I'm sure he's at least somewhat familiar with the ROI from this type of ad. Although I fear he's playing big corp marketing game with a small-time company. $5m in the right hands could be much better spent elsewhere but some companies lack the creativity/talent to do that effective hit-the-streets type of startup marketing.

So why not write a single big pay cheque to solve a big hard problem?

It certainly is lacking in imagination. If this is the best you can come up with to target your niche then this is a bit of a warning sign that not all is right inside the company. But then again what do I know :)

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/social-finance#/enti...

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

/r/hailcorporate.

"Why burn $5MM in a quarter or a month when you can do it in 30 seconds?"

Didn't we learn in the nineties this sort of thing doesn't work?

You would assume the board will have approved something like this so the investors have to take responsibility.

Isn't that kinda the point! ;)

Yikes. :-/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-03/this-lende...

Looks like Martinis are the modern day toasters.

Let's seem them beat the ad for So Fine.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io53QMwHZ48

Eventually everyone will be bored, but I don't think it's this year.

I agree that it's probably easy for the HN crowd to think mass TV advertising is over, when it actually isn't. I just think that for certain audiences it makes a whole lot more sense than others. If I were running a startup looking to cash in on the huge numbers of boomers entering their senior years then a Super Bowl ad might make sense. For one targeting not just millennials, but relatively affluent millennials it makes a lot less sense.