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Super Bowl Retains Status as Must-Buy Television
January 29, 2004
Twenty years after the Super Bowl first became
as big a day for advertising as it is for professional
football, Madison Avenue is gearing up for what
looks to be a cheerier, somewhat sillier and
certainly more expensive version of the annual
midwinter festival of commercialism.
The Ad Bowl within Super Bowl XXXVIII, to be
broadcast on Sunday by CBS, will be infused
with oversize servings of ingredients like humor,
schmaltz, special effects and anthropomorphic
animals.
Instead of the Budweiser horses bowing in the
direction of ground zero as in 2002, a donkey
will be shown dreaming of becoming a Clydesdale.
And rather than Pepsi-Cola's sweet nostalgia
of two years ago when Britney Spears danced
and sang her way through the decades, the brand's
newest commercial will serenade 16 teenagers
sued by the recording industry for illegal file
sharing with "I Fought the Law (and the
Law Won).''
For the privilege of appearing during the Super
Bowl, companies including Anheuser-Busch, FedEx,
General Motors, I.B.M., Monster Worldwide and
Procter & Gamble are paying an average of
$2.3 million for a 30-second commercial, up
from $2.1 million last year. But CBS will have
no trouble selling out the commercial time for
the game, even though the growing cost of a
spot has drastically outpaced the inflation
rate over the years. The game is almost always
the most-watched television program of the year,
expected to be viewed this year entirely or
in part by a projected 130 million Americans.
And in an era of shrinking TV ratings for the
networks, the erosion of viewership in important
categories like men ages 18 to 34 and the growing
disdain for commercials as annoyances to be
zapped, the Super Bowl is perhaps the only program
with an audience that looks forward to seeing
the commercials.
Just as in 1984, when Apple Computer and the
Chiat/Day agency kicked off the tradition of
spectacular, splashy spots made especially for
the game, almost all of the 40 or so commercials
to be shown by CBS will be new to viewers.
Not only will there be a battle between two
erectile-dysfunction
drugs, Cialis and Levitra, the Super Bowl will
also bring a credit card competition, between
MasterCard and Visa; a film fight among the
Walt Disney, Sony Pictures, Universal and Warner
Brothers movie studios; and an automotive altercation
among brands like Cadillac, Chevrolet, Dodge
and Mitsubishi.
And Apple is returning to the Super Bowl, in
a partnership with the Pepsi-Cola division of
PepsiCo, to give away iTunes music downloads.
The tone of recent years - the dourness of
the dot.com bust, the post-9/11 patriotism and
the pre-Iraq- war jitters of last year - will
be lightened. Last year, viewers saw a federal
antidrug commercial linking drug use and terrorism.
On Sunday, they will watch the false teeth fly
as an elderly couple wrestle over a bag of Lay's
potato chips.
The perkier Super Bowl mostly reflects opinion
polls showing an upturn in the national mood
as well as data indicating what may finally
be the arrival of the long-awaited economic
recovery.
The appeal of advertising in the Super Bowl
comes from reaching attentive consumers, who
are of increasingly important value, marketers
say, as the television landscape undergoes wrenching
alterations. That has led advertisers to begin
questioning their decades-long love affair with
what has been the biggest, most important advertising
medium.
"At the affluent end of the market, our
customers have so many media choices, like the
Internet, DVD's and 500 channels," said
Mark LaNeve, general manager at the Cadillac
division of General Motors in Detroit. "But
they take time out of their lives for 'big event'
television like the Super Bowl, one of the few
properties that exist today where people are
still actually watching the commercials."
Cadillac will be in the game for the third
year in a row, Mr. LaNeve said, with an elaborate
new spot by Chemistri in Troy, Mich., part of
the Publicis Groupe, using special effects to
show four 2004 models making waves, literally
and figuratively.
"It would be incredibly inefficient if
you did all your media buying this way,"
Mr. LaNeve said, referring to the price of a
spot on Sunday, "and every year we ask
if the Super Bowl makes sense."
"So far," he added, "it has."
Those advantages, marketers say, outweigh daunting
concerns like Mr. LaNeve's over the rising cost
to appear in the game or to produce the glitzy
Super Bowl spots, which can total in the hundreds
of thousands of dollars.
For Super Bowl I, in 1967, a 30-second spot
cost about $42,000, or $239,167 in today's dollars,
adjusted for inflation, according to Advertising
Age. For Super Bowl XVIII in 1984, when Apple
made ad history with a spot called "1984"
that introduced the Macintosh PC, 30 seconds
of ad time cost about $450,000 (or $833,584
in current dollars). This year, CBS will bring
in an estimated $138 million for the game.
source:-http://www.nytimes.com
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