By Joyce M. Rosenberg, Business Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --A coffee with an edgy name and made by a small business is getting a commercial in Super Bowl 50.
Death Wish Coffee Co. won a competition held by software maker Intuit for a 30-second spot during the third quarter of the big game on Feb. 7. The Round Lake, New York, company beat more than 15,000 other small businesses in voting by the public and Intuit employees.
Death Wish was founded in 2012 by Mike Brown, who owns a coffee house in Saratoga Springs, New York, and wanted to find a strong, highly-caffeinated brew. Packaged in a black bag with a skull and bones label, the coffee, a blend that Brown created, is sold in a handful of stores and online. Death Wish currently sells about 1,000 pounds a day, a number expected to increase considerably after the Super Bowl spot runs.
Brown recently hired two employees to prepare for a jump in business, giving him a staff of 12.
"If even half a percent of the people who watch the commercial decide to buy a bag and give it a try, and 90 percent of them recommend it to others, we could have some amazing growth in the future," he said.
The commercial shows a Viking galley ship in stormy waters with the crew exhorted to keep rowing; the ship and the sea end up in a cup of Death Wish coffee downed by a man in his 21st-century kitchen.
Super Bowl commercials are usually bought by high-profile brands like Chevrolet, Doritos and Budweiser. Some spots have been used to showcase younger but fast-growing companies, most notably Apple, whose 1984 commercial creating buzz about its Macintosh computer is seen as the gold standard of Super Bowl ads.
But with a spot costing $5 million for air time alone, the game is far beyond the advertising budget of most small businesses.
Death Wish is the second company that Intuit has bought an ad for. In 2014, it paid for a spot for GoldieBlox, a toy for girls, after holding a similar competition.
The Super Bowl is the most-watched event in the U.S. Last year's game between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks had an audience of over 114 million people. The ads get almost as much attention as the game itself. Viewers post comments on social media during the game, and the commercials are a topic of conversation the day after.
South Korea fines Meta $15 million for illegally collecting information on Facebook users
South Korea's privacy watchdog on Tuesday fined social media company Meta 21.6 billion won ($15 million) for illegally collecting sensitive personal information from Facebook users, including data about their political views and sexual orientation, and sharing it with thousands of advertisers.
It was the latest in a series of penalties against Meta by South Korean authorities in recent years as they increase their scrutiny of how the company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, handles private information.
Following a four-year investigation, South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission concluded that Meta unlawfully collected sensitive information about around 980,000 Facebook users, including their religion, political views and whether they were in same-sex unions, from July 2018 to March 2022.
It said the company shared the data with around 4,000 advertisers.
South Korea's privacy law provides strict protection for information related to personal beliefs, political views and sexual behavior, and bars companies from processing or using such data without the specific consent of the person involved.
The commission said Meta amassed sensitive information by analyzing the pages the Facebook users liked or the advertisements they clicked on.
The company categorized ads to identify users interested in themes such as specific religions, same-sex and transgender issues, and issues related to North Korean escapees, said Lee Eun Jung, a director at the commission who led the investigation on Meta.
"While Meta collected this sensitive information and used it for individualized services, they made only vague mentions of this use in their data policy and did not obtain specific consent," Lee said.
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