Focus Brags About Their NFL Ad

Focus On The Family is doing cartwheels about the response to their Children Of The NFL Corn ad, which ran during Tim Tebow's flameout on Saturday.

When the ad aired a few minutes into the second quarter, the Internet exploded. Within minutes, as the YouTube video began going viral, both John 3:16 and Focus on the Family were trending worldwide as the top Internet search terms. By Monday morning, more than 5,600 people had opened a blog by Esther Fleece, Daly’s assistant for millennial relations, about Tebow (see “Tim Tebow’s Good News”), and the left-leaning group change.org had started a petition drive for people to force CBS to apologize for running the ad — a sort of backhanded compliment. Twelve hours later, “Focus on the Family” was the fifth most-searched-for term on Google, and “John 3:16” was fourteenth. But the most important outcome was measured by feedback the ministry received shortly after the ad aired. “Both my sons just saw your commercial and gave their lives to Christ as a result,” one man wrote on Twitter. “Thank you. #John316.”

According to Focus, CBS received the ad only ten minutes before airtime because of the rushed production once permission for the buy was granted.