I had never heard of the Employment Policies Institute until last night, when they put up and anti-deficit ad during the Super Bowl.  It was a decent ad, using a dystopic version of the Pledge of Allegiance to emphasize the dangers of runaway government spending.

They may have gotten a lot of good publicity with that ad.  We’ll never know, however, because the ad was run again less than 1 minute later during the same set of commercials.

Now, just about everyone who watches the Super Bowl knows that ad space during the big game is expensive (roughly $2.5M this year), yet as far as I can remember, EPI – in the name of thrift – was the only advertiser to run the same exact ad twice.  That would have been a waste of money even if they didn’t run them nearly back-to-back (which, and readers can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, is a network decision).

Even worse, EPI made no mention of their actual anti-debt campaign (Defeat the Debt) during the ad.

So, while I certainly appreciated the EPI message against government spending, it would have gone a lot farther if they themselves had been frugal, stuck to airing the ad once, and held on to the $2.5M.

Or maybe I’m just bitter because the Jets weren’t on the field.

Cross-posted to RWL

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