It was not thought at the time that a game like Mario Kart could run on the Mega Drive with the same performance profile, yet Sega of America (perhaps ambitiously) chose to portray it as the "slower" game.
Mode 7 allows the Super NES to scale and rotate background planes - something only achievable on the Mega Drive through software. In addition to provoking hardware comparisons, the advert also has a subtle dig at Super Mario Kart - Nintendo's flagship racing game which relies on the Super NES' hardware graphics mode, " Mode 7", as well as a built-in DSP-1 enhancement chip, a math co-processor that further improved the system's Mode 7 capabilities. The term was not officially used outside of North America, likely for this reason. These sorts of "attack ads" were commonplace in the US at the time - other countries with stricter advertising regulations would not be able to air it, not least because it is a difficult to prove the truthfulness of what was being said. The advert wasn't designed to cause people to think about what was being said, just that Sega and the Genesis were "better" than Nintendo and the Super NES. The Super NES, however, stutters while Super Mario Kart plays. A drag race occurs, with the Genesis speeding off, displaying footage from Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Ecco the Dolphin and Streets of Rage 2. A Genesis (linked up to a TV) is strapped to a high-speed drag racer, while a Super NES is strapped to an old van. While the term would be used several times across Sega's marketing output, "blast processing" is usually remembered in North America for appearing in a 30-second commercial by Sega's choice of marketing agency, Goodby Silverstein & Partners. In more recent years, the term "blast processing" is occasionally used as a reference to the fast blitting capabilities of its DMA unit (see Sega Mega Drive/Technical specifications for details). The term is thus open to interpretation, and has been interpreted in different ways, as a reference to either the Mega Drive's faster performance, its higher CPU clock rate, its DMA controller, a specific DMA color technique (which is apparently what inspired the term), or just a meaningless marketing gimmick (as claimed by Nintendo). While the Mega Drive is indeed capable of faster processing performance than the SNES, particularly due to the Mega Drive's Yamaha YM7101 VDP graphics processor having a faster DMA controller along with higher memory bandwidth (see Sega Mega Drive/Hardware comparison for a technical comparison with the SNES), the term "blast processing" itself was vague and unclear, due to a lack of technical explanation from Sega. "What makes the Genesis the superior machine?" It has "blast processing".
Blast processing was a marketing term coined by Sega of America to promote the Sega Mega Drive (Sega Genesis in that region) video game console over its nearest rival, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), in North America.