| Advertisers
ready for the big game
January 30, 2004
Impotency drugs have made strides since former
Sen. Bob Dole became the public face of Viagra.
Six years after Dole let us in on his secret,
erectile dysfunction
ads are hitting the Super Bowl. That and this
report from The Orlando Sentinel's Christopher
Boyd
Two drug makers, and possibly three, will spend
millions of dollars to pitch their pills to
families gathered for Sunday's big game. If
the past is a predictor, sex aids will be the
talk of the nation on Monday morning.
Companies will spend an average $2.3 million
for 30-second spots during the game, which is
not only the most-watched sporting event of
the year, but the showcase for commercial extravaganzas.
"The Super Bowl is the biggest event to
enter the American calendar since Abraham Lincoln
proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday,"
said Bob Thompson, director of the Center for
the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse
University. "It's like the old days of
network television when people gathered at the
same cultural trough to watch the same show."
Many advertisers who choose the Super Bowl
sell products that appeal to the mass audience.
Beer, soft drinks, snacks and cars are perennial
standbys. But it's the exceptions that draw
the most attention.
A few years ago, a swell of dot-com companies
gambled their annual advertising budgets for
a piece of the Super Bowl. Some of the ads were
clever, but many of the companies fell flat
when the Internet bubble burst.
Many viewers say that they find the commercials
more interesting than the game itself, a fact
not lost on advertising agencies.
"Viewers are much more attentive to advertising
during the Super Bowl than they ordinarily are,"
said Jeff Mordos, chief operating officer of
BBDO New York, an advertising firm producing
commercials for six companies that will air
Sunday. "Consumers want to be entertained.
They are sitting there during the game waiting
to see what the next ad will be."
Advertisers joke that during the Super Bowl,
people leave their chairs during the game so
that they can be front and center for the commercials.
"People watch the ads more closely during
the Super Bowl than during almost any other
kind of programming," Mordos said. "If
the ads are likable, a feeding frenzy begins
as people talk to each other about what they
saw."
Monday morning will test how eager people are
to talk about erectile problems. But the public
can expect to learn a lot about what the world
thought. USA Today Ad Meter, a viewer reaction
poll in its 16th year, will offer a ranking
of which ads resonated most strongly, and a
host of smaller polls and Internet reaction
sites will amplify the reaction.
Syracuse's Thompson said the anticipation that
precedes the ads and the postmortems that follow
are part of the reason why companies are willing
to spend so much for such tiny windows of exposure.
"When you pay an outlandish amount of
money for one of these commercials, you're buying
all the talk that goes on before and after,"
Thompson said.
Thompson said advertisers realize that the
more outrageous the commercial, the more likely
the world will talk about it after the game.
That has led some companies to produce spots
that more closely resemble 30-second feature
films than product promotions.
"These commercials have become every ad
agency's dream come true," Thompson said.
"The agencies seem to have forgotten what
the commercial is for, which is moving products
off the shelf."
In the case of this year's drug ads, the issue
will be how explicit the product message will
be. Cialis,
Eli Lilly and Co. and Icos Corp.'s new impotency
medicine, will trade spots with Bayer AG and
GlaxoSmithKline's Levitra, a drug designed to
treat the same problem.
The Cialis spot is expected to offer the most
information about the medical problem, making
it a candidate for next Monday's water cooler
conversation piece.
One thing they won't be talking about is politics.
CBS, the network carrying the game, rejected
two ads -- one from the left-leaning MoveOn.org
group that would have criticized the Bush administration
and another from People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals -- saying advocacy ads and football
don't mix. On Wednesday, 27 congressmen sent
the network a letter calling its stance on advocacy
advertising an "affront to free speech."
But for advertisers that stick to products
and messages that the network doesn't consider
controversial, game day remains a fairly open
field. Jeff Taylor, founder of Monster, the
Internet job-searching site, said his company
will use the Super Bowl to launch its annual
ad campaign for the sixth year.
"You just don't leave your seat during
the Super Bowl," he said. "It's also
the Ad Bowl. The crescendo raised by the ads
can get louder than the game itself, and that
makes it the appropriate platform for us."
That and this report from The Orlando Sentinel's
Christopher Boyd
source:-http://www.sportsbusinessnews.com
More Information
:
Online
Pharmacy For Weight Loss Diet Pills - Prescription
Medications Online. Free online doctor consultation.
FDA approved medications filled by a US Licensed
Pharmacy at HealthOnlinePharmacy.com
Human
Miracles - Healing America - Human Miracles
offers Pain Away, Ellagitannin, N-Zyme, Colon
Activator, Colon Detox, SyndRx including Liver
Clear, Wild Oats, A Thousand Fires, Nerve Tonic,
Brain Gain, Block, Kokoro, Natural Balance Plus
and more.
Effective
Pain Treatment - Buy Online Pain Relief
Medications - Celebrex, Ultram, Vioxx.
|
