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Super Bowl Wrap-Up: 1/31/07

Honestly, this Wrap-Up is going to be so huge you might want to print it out and take it to the bathroom with you. Though that might make clicking the links a bit harder. You could take your lap-top with you, but that's not going to work if you're on a PC. You could take your PC with you, but that's going to need a long extension cord. Aww heck, just read it now. If you have time. Otherwise save it for later. I might be rambling.

First off, print out your Super Bowl advertising scorecard here at TV Week.

Over on my personal Movie Marketing Madness site I opine on why so few movie studios have opted out of advertising during this year's game.

All the talk about Kevin Federline's commercial for Nationwide Insurance, including the displeasure of the National Restaurant Association over the portrayal of fast-food jobs as undesirable, means the insurance company is already happy with its decision to but a Super Bowl ad.

Speaking of Federline's ad for Nationwide, you can view a teaser of the spot here.

Get ready for your "Meta Moment" for the day. Marketers are exploring various options for sponsoring the online streaming of the Super Bowl ads. That's right: Ad sponsorship. Some days there's just not enough scotch.

A North Carolina wine company named Cheerwine took advantage of the lower prices available by buying ads through local affiliates to run their first Super Bowl commercial. That spot is teaser to a full campaign that will launch in April.

Quick update on J.P., the guy trying to raise the money to buy a Super Bowl commercial he can use to propose to his girlfriend. Apparently he's actually shot a number of attempts but it sounds like we're going to have to wait to see the finished product.

Continue reading Super Bowl Wrap-Up: 1/31/07

Super Bowl Wrap-Up: 1/28/07

Just one more week to go before the Bears win the Super Bowl.

CBS will partner with TiVo to promote a couple of its shows in the time leading up to the Super Bowl. That includes sneak peaks in the TiVo Showcase and one-click recording of the game itself.

More chatter, this time from the New York Times, about how to maximize the return on the $2.6 million it cost to get a TV spot during the game.

Snapple is buying its first ever Super Bowl ad to promote the health benefits of its Green, Red, White and Black teas.

Steve Hall reminds us all that SpotBowl will be tallying up viewer ratings of the game's commercials. Remember to vote early and often and abuse the system as much as possible to favor spots you personally worked on.

AdFreak points to a pair of best/worst of all time lists. It's amazing how these stories get published every year.

All of the Budweiser Super Bowl ads in 3 minutes and 9 seconds

All of the Super Bowl commercials that Budweiser will run have been posted to YouTube. You can see snippets of all 8 of them on this page, or you can check out the video below. It condenses all the ads into 3 minutes and 9 seconds. The ads this year feature crabs, Clydesdales, a space station, and a hitchhiker with an axe.

One of them, "Rock, Paper, Scissors," has already run on television (at least I think it has, or did I see it online?), so it's not new or special for this Super Bowl. As for the other ads, again I say...eh. I've never been a fan of the Budweiser commercials, and I can never understand why they seem to win ad critic and viewer polls for best ads every year.

I like the one with the dog though. Dogs are cool.

Super Bowl Wrap-Up: 1/25/06

Coke is back in the Super Bowl after nearly a decade away from the game. Its two first half spots, one 30 and one 60 seconds in length, will take the soda company head to head with arch rival Pepsi, which is a perennial advertiser.

A pregnant Chicago-area woman who's also a huge Bears fan is offering advertising space on her swollen belly to get the money to try and buy Super Bowl tickets. She's also willing to trade the space for actual tickets if anyone has them.

Tim Nudd points out all the stylistic points included in this year's official game logo and wonders whether we all think it actually works or not.

"Are Super Bowl ads worth it?" asks CNN Money. While on the surface my answer would be no, the article does point out that there needs to be something worth talking about with the ads in order for them to really impact on the audience. Reuters covers much the same territory.

InfoUSA is purchasing its first ever Super Bowl ad to promote SalesGenie and will also be sponsoring the pre-game broadcast.

CBS affiliates have a few spots in each quarter that have been made available for local advertisers who want to get in on the game but don't have $2.6 million lying around. Some national advertisers are buying these spots as a way to get around another company's exclusive ad buys at a network level.

Someone created a kind of funny fake Disney Super Bowl ad.

Super Bowl Wrap-Up: 1/23/07

You'll be able to register your opinion of the Super Bowl's ads at AdBowl, which lets consumers vote on what spots they liked the best and which they didn't care for. You can also check out which have been the most favorite over the last few years.

HCD Research will convene a panel of experts to evaluate which ads best met a series of criteria such as creativity, excitement and more. Let's all try to contain our own excitement as ads are measured against the work that went into them and not how they were actually received by the target audience.

The National Restaurant Association doesn't care for the fact that Progressive's Super Bowl ad starring Kevin Federline presents working in a fast-food restaurant in a negative light.

Joseph Jaffe is registering his annual disappointment with the advertising industry and their lack of ingenuity when it comes to encouraging ad viewers to go online, specifically as it relates to the Super Bowl's spots.

MediaPost rounds-up some developments with the consumer contests companies have been running leading up to the big game, as does the Baltimore Sun.

Super Bowl Wrap-Up: 1/20/07

If the TV networks think long and hard enough and convince themselves that the Super Bowl will remain untouched by DVR ad-skipping and that they can still charge outrageous prices for ads it just might come true.

It's a little hard to reconcile the two main points of this article, which is that on the one hand CBS is having a hard time selling the in-game inventory it has but, on the other hand, ad time is expected to rise in terms of sheer minutes.

As I'd mentioned before, Toyota is buying a pair of Super Bowl spots to promote their Tundra pick-up. That's just part of a $100 million campaign to try and double sales of the model.

Yes, the point of Chevy's contest for consumer-generated ads to air during the game is to attract real people and not necessarily suck up to other ad folks. Thank you. We know that.

Try and convince me - just try - that the announcement of Katie Couric's inclusion in the pre-game broadcast doesn't have something to do with boosting viewership as well as ad prices.

Behind the scenes of K-Fed's Super Bowl ad

It's not actually much of a behind-the-scenes clip, since it just shows Kevin Federline "rapping" (I use the quotes because I don't think what he's doing actually qualifies) about Nationwide. Then he snaps at the camera with his hands like he's calling "cut" on the shoot just to show how street he is. If this is a preview of things to come I think I might throw up in my mouth more than ever before.

Watch the first banned GoDaddy ad

GoDaddy has put up what it says is the first Super Bowl ad it's had rejected by CBS for inclusion in the Super Bowl. The spot doesn't feature either Candice Michelle or Danica Patrick but instead is just two white guys in their cubicles. One guy is showing off how easy domain registration is with GoDaddy by buying domains related to the other guy's family. It doesn't sound too risque until you see what the other guy's last name is and that the first guy keeps saying "I just did your dog/wife/mom."

[via AdRants]

20 years of Super Bowl ad stats

Some interesting facts from this eMarketer report on Super Bowl advertising in the last 20 years:
  • Over 11 hours of airtime has been devoted just to the commercials.
  • 221 different advertisers have bought spots.
  • Over 1,400 spots have aired.
  • $1.72 billion has been spent by advertisers just on buying the spots. That doesn't include production costs.
  • Just the top five advertisers have spent $613.4 million.
  • The cost of a spot has quadrupled in that time. That means it was roughly $500,000 or so for a spot in 1987.
Have fun factoring this year's spending into that.

K-Fed in S-Bowl

Britney Spear's ex-husband Kevin Federline will be appearing in a Super Bowl commercial for Nationwide Insurance. The spot is a bit of a spoof of Super Bowl spots and....I'm sorry...I can't go on. I have to go bathe in kerosene. K-Fed, the guy who's sole claim to fame is that he single-handedly brought down Spears' music career is appearing in a Super Bowl spot. Spoof or not this crosses some sort of line that I'm just not comfortable with.

[pic via Crayon]

Super Bowl Wrap-Up: 1/17/06

Jackie Huba at Church of the Customer is talking about how many amateur ads we're going to be seeing during this year's Super Bowl. It's especially interesting how she points out that one of the finalists in the Doritos contest was made for just $150, a far cry from the multi-million budgets most ads have.

JD Lasica points out that the only entry in that Doritos contest that doesn't portray women as sex symbols was produced by the only all-female team left standing in the voting.

Seems that when representatives for Britney Spears talked to the NFL about the Pantyless One being in some Super Bowl promos for the network they were turned down, saying Spears was too much of a liability. I don't know, I think her inner thigh might be the next great ad delivery platform. Spears' people, of course, deny these reports.

Continue reading Super Bowl Wrap-Up: 1/17/06

I watch the Super Bowl for the commercials

Tom BradyYes, I'm one of those people, the ones who watch the Super Bowl for the commercials. I have no interest in football whatsoever.*

I'm a tennis and baseball fan (my brief affair with basketball stopped when the Celtics stopped being good, too long ago to remember), but I never miss the Super Bowl even though on most days I'd rather watch a Sex and the City marathon than watch football. I get involved in the pre-game hype of the commercials, what the ads cost, who is going to advertise when, how many ads a particular company has during the show, and even the post-game analysis the next day, usually in USA Today, where they have people watch the ads with meters and pick their favorites and least favorites (Budweiser wins many years, and I've never understood that). So I'm looking forward to the game in a few weeks, and we'll have full coverage of the ads here at Adjab.

*Of course, if the Patriots make it, this could all change.

CBS has to be sweating just a little

Here's a shocking bit of news (unless you're me in which case it's so very, very not): CBS has only sold to date about 70 percent of its Super Bowl broadcast ad inventory, with about 16 slots still remaining. That means the sales team at the network is scrambling to sell the remaining inventory before the February 5th game. Every day closer the game gets, though, the less power CBS has in the sales process. They certainly can't be left with too much unsold inventory but they also can't deal too much since people who bought early at a higher price might be honked off. But it's the high production cost on top of the high buy-in that may be causing the hesitation of some companies.

It's kind of funny to hear one CBS exec play up the fact that the spots will get replayed online so often as an incentive for people to buy commercials. After all, it's online that drawing off so much of TV's audience. Every year that goes by it seems to me that those stories about how the Super Bowl is the one last big live audience draw seem a little more desperate. It appears that more and more companies are realizing they don't actually need to reach that mass audience and prefer the niche targeting the web allows for. If they do decide to go mass advertising, though, they're waiting until they can at least have more of a say in how much they pay to do so.

Ad firm drops GoDaddy just before Super Bowl

Shine, the Madison, WI ad agency that had been tasked to create this year's GoDaddy Super Bowl commercials, has said it is parting ways with the internet registrar company over "creative differences." No one, not Shine or GoDaddy, is offering anything in the way of comments on the decision beyond just the generic "it didn't work out" sort of canned corporate statement. That means we're all free to speculate just what those creative differences might be.

What I'm curious about is where this leaves the ads that are in production. I'm assuming that GoDaddy is retaining ownership of the creative but it's just weird. I mean how do you walk away from something like this so close to game day unless you feel like you're getting screwed massively by the other party? I would have loved to have seen the meetings that led up to this. Seriously, this was a missed pay-per-view opportunity.

Pepsi messes with the packaging

Pepsi has announced two new campaigns, one revolving around the Super Bowl and one not, but both involving futzing with their packaging.

The first is this push, scheduled to launch in February, that will have the soft drink company changing the look of its packaging every few weeks in 2007. Considering that's three times more than the look of the drink has changed in over 100 years, that's a big deal. The constantly shifting packaging is part of an attempt to become more of a "cool kids" drink and will also include asking people to design a billboard that will be displayed in New York City's Times Square in April.

The Super Bowl-related promotion also involves Pepsi's packaging, but in a much different way. As part of its sponsorship of the game's halftime show it's asking people to register and get a code at SuperBowl.com/pepsi. The person with the winning code wins not only Super Bowl tickets for life but also a jewel-bedecked can valued at $100,000. That's right, a $100,000 piece of Pepsi bling. If this is the rec room conversation starter you've been waiting for go register and good luck to you.

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