Superbowl ads down, White House buys two spots:
By Monty Phan
STAFF WRITER
February 1, 2002
For advertisers, Sunday will still be super, even if the state of the industry isn't.
Despite a war and a recession - not to mention the start of the Winter Olympics next week - the Super Bowl retains its reputation as the premier showcase for advertisers, who will shell out an average of just under $2 million per 30-second spot during Sunday's game, down from the $2 million-plus averages the previous two years.
The signs are there, though, that the big game isn't quite the attraction it has been in years past. Fox, which is televising the game, still had three or four spots to sell as late as Tuesday, although Fox Sports spokesman Lou D'Ermilio said that the last time the network had the game, in 1999, it didn't sell its last ad until the Thursday before the Super Bowl.
The network also reportedly sold two spots for a total of about $3.5 million to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, which will air ads suggesting that buying drugs can indirectly finance terrorist organizations. Although the office declined to comment on the ads, the management agency for British director Tony Kaye, who helmed the 1998 film "American History X," said he shot two commercials for the drug-policy office but declined to say whether they were for Sunday's game.
Furthermore, under a program approved by Congress in 1997 outlining guidelines for TV anti-drug spots, networks must match the ad money spent by the federal government with, for example, free ads or anti-drug messages in TV shows. So the government ad buy is really worth half of however much Fox got for the spots, suggesting that the network was having a hard time finding someone to pay full price (Fox Sports declined to comment on the anti-drug ads).
Nevertheless, Fox - which also has had to contend with the start of the Winter Olympics, just five days after the championship game - has seen nearly a 25 percent increase in its Super Bowl ad rates since the $1.6 million average per 30-second spot it charged for 1999's game, and about a 60 percent jump since the $1.2 million average it had when it aired the Super Bowl in 1997.
Normally, there are two weeks between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl, but this year there's only one. The extra week of "hype time" typically gives a lift to advertisers, said David Blum, the senior vice president of Baltimore-based Eisner Communications, which has conducted an annual Super Bowl advertising survey since 1990.
"If I'm an advertising guy and my product is going to be on the Super Bowl, and I've invested $1.5 [million], $2 [million] or $2.2 million, and I really want to play this game the right way, I want to generate a lot of publicity about the fact that I'm a Super Bowl advertiser," he said.
Islandia-based Computer Associates will have an ad run regionally during the game, in the New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. areas, said Nancy Bhagat, CA's director of corporate branding. Rather than a new spot, it will be one of the three current ads promoting the company's security, storage and business platform software.
The Universal Orlando Resort amusement park will attempt to create an identity via a 60-second Super Bowl spot that points out that the Florida city is known for something other than Disney World. Although the goal isn't to get postgame sound bites of victorious players saying, "I'm going to Universal Orlando!", the theme park hopes that once they visit, "They'll be saying it on their own," said Gretchen Hofmann, the park's senior vice president of marketing |
