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In a surprising move, Cramer-Krasselt, Chicago, resigned as powerhouse Internet site CareerBuilder's agency of record after five years of propelling them to be one of the top Internet sites in the world. They have surpassed their other powerful rival Monster in total listings and traffic driven to the site.

So why did they do it? The only reason so far given is they took the results of an irrelevant USA Today's viewer poll, which isn't really seriously considered as accurate by people in the industry, and put the account up for review after the ad they provided for the Super Bowl didn't rank in the top ten of that poll.

The agency's president, Peter Krivkovich, said in a memo:

"To our amazement, to our total astonishment, all that astounding business success was less important than one poll, C-Kers, we have to tell you -- in our entire history, hell in the history of this crazy thing called advertising, I'm not sure there has ever been any thing as baseless or as unbelievable as that. It's so ludicrous and they are so serious about that poll it's almost funny."

When you see what the agency did for CareerBuilder, it's amazing that something like this could happen. There are one of two things going on here. There's someone at CareerBuilder's that doesn't understand the right way to measure, or there's an underlying motivation not revealed at this time.

Every time something like this comes up that makes no sense, there will either be incompetence involved or another deal under the table with another company.

But the results brought by Cramer-Krasselt make the deal with another company scenario pretty dumb at minimum. It sounds like this may be an ego thing from executives at CareerBuilder to see themselves in a poll that businesses don't even consider a relevant metric to the industry.

If that's what's happened here, it could cost them a lot in the long run. If I was Monster, I'd go after Cramer-Krasselt right now to get them to be their agency and get them to bring it back on their chief nemesis and make them pay for what seems to be an extraordinarily ignorant move.