Given that the purpose of advertising is to create beliefs and feelings favorable to a company or its products and ultimately to cause purchases, the ad is stupid because it will fail to achieve any of these outcomes. The student who submitted this SMT found a newspaper story about a price-based promotion that Pizza Hut of Maryland ran last fall. The deal focused on a match-up between the Baltimore Ravens and the Philadelphis Eagles. Specifically, PH promised to cut the price of a large pizza by one dollar every time Baltimore sacked the Eagles' quarterback. The argument for why this was stupid focused on the difference between the controllable and uncontrollable factors in marketing management.
Managers control the marketing mix, or product, price, promotion, and place.
They cannot control things that happen in the environment, such as the number of times a quarterback gets sacked in a football game. But in this promotion, Pizza Hut gave up its control over price and allowed it to be set by a factor it could not control. This SMT won the Professor's Choice award last semester. This SMT won the People's Choice Award last semester. The cracker whacker was described as a device that would hurl a cracker the length of a football field.