Bueller? Anyone? Notice the $26,984 Slot Win In Hard Rock's Ad?

I’m pretty agnostic when it comes to Matthew Broderick — loved him as Ferris Bueller, obviously, but outside of that, meh — and when it comes to Hard Rock Bet, I’m a little less agnostic (been banned from their promos, but whatever).

One thing I am not agnostic about, however, is the new ad campaign from Hard Rock featuring Broderick.

While the commercial is clever enough and even mildly entertaining, there is one part of it — a two-second portion — that I find objectionable to the point of disgust.

See if you can spot it …

If you found it, congratulations. We think alike. I also hate mayonnaise.

Also, there’s a second part that is equally objectionable. Go back and watch again. It’s at the 17-second mark, when the camera has a close-up of the Cash Eruption slot.

Here’s the thing: The clip — like virtually all commercials for everything — seems to be taking place in an upper-middle class environment. The woman who’s doing the gambling in the spot lays down $40 on a spin of the Cash Eruption slot, which is a ton of money. One $40 spin — which takes about one second — is roughly the hourly take-home pay for someone who makes $115,000 a year.

And the spin hits for $26,984.

That’s nearly 675 times her wager, which would be a pretty good result under most circumstances. I mean, I’ve been playing online casino for a decade, and I’m relatively confident I never hit for 675x.

And just as quickly as the big bet and big win appears, it’s gone.

Look closely

Is anyone looking at this ad as closely as I am? Is anyone actually noticing the $40 bet and the ridiculous payout?

Not all that consciously, I’m sure. But deep in our brains, you better believe it’s registering.

I’m not accusing Hard Rock Bet of subliminal advertising. Two seconds is not subliminal. Two seconds is considerably longer, however, than our dumb brains need to understand the basic idea being placed in front of it.

In a 1996 study, ”Speed of Processing in the Human Visual System,” researchers found that people could categorize a complex natural image in under 150 milliseconds.

And this image is not especially complex.

Woman. Kitchen. A $40 spin. Nearly $27,000 coming back.

That’s the whole message, and the commercial gives you just enough time to receive it without giving you any time to consider it. No one watching this is stopping to think about how unusual a $40 slot spin is for an average person, what the odds of winning might be, or how many $40 spins someone would have to run through before seeing a 675x result.

You just see the money.

There’s more research that gets uncomfortably close to explaining why this bothers me.

In ”Subliminal Priming of Winning Images Prompts Increased Betting in Slot Machine Play,” researchers had participants play a computerized slot machine. Some of them were repeatedly shown jackpot symbols for just 30 milliseconds during preliminary play.

Those exposed to the jackpot images ended up wagering more and expressed greater confidence on a final spin.

That was a lab experiment, and the jackpot images were repeated, were displayed during simulated gambling, and the effect appeared to be short-lived. So I’m not going to sit here and pretend academics have proven that seeing two seconds of Matthew Broderick slot footage is going to send anyone into bankruptcy.

But the research does tell us a few things. Winning images can be processed extremely quickly, and seeing big wins might encourage people to bet more.

No jackpots

Hard Rock Bet did not accidentally show an attractive, upwardly mobile woman turning $40 into $26,984. Truth in advertising might have been a schlubby guy spinning for 20 cents and winning 12 cents back while sitting on the toilet.

Clearly, someone behind the scenes chose the wager, the payout, how tight to frame the screen. And someone chose to leave it there for only about two seconds before moving along.

What makes this even more silly is that, in Hard Rock Bet’s own announcement of the campaign, Peter Hughes, a group creative director at the agency 72andSunny New York, said the company wanted to look beyond the gambling industry’s “obsession with jackpots.”

And then, right in the middle of an ordinary-looking home, it slipped in a nearly $27,000 jackpot and had it disappear before most viewers could even ask what the hell they had just seen.

Maybe I’m overly sensitive to this stuff. After all, I stare at gambling companies for a living. But I also know a $40 spin during breakfast time is an outrageous amount to gamble for nearly all humans, and a 675x payout is a once-in-a-lifetime hit.

It’s crappy, is all I’m saying.