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To: Asterisk who wrote (19904)	12/17/1998 4:31:00 AM
From: Jon Koplik	Respond to of 152472

Moving right along to football (and the Super Bowl) ... I read (more than a year ago) that Fox Television (which has the rights to the January 1999 Super Bowl) was thinking about doing a 24 hour long pre-game show (!) My first reaction upon hearing this was "Are you guys crazy ?" Then, I started thinking : what is usually on TV at 4:00 A.M. ? (Actually, today, I could give you a full report on that ...) Why not have neat stuff from old Super Bowls on for hours and hours ? Anyway, I just saw an article about plans for the upcoming Super Bowl. It turns out that this year's pre-game show will be (a mere) 7 hours. Jon. December 17, 1998 Fox Nears Sellout of Super Bowl Ads Filed at 12:02 a.m. EST By The Associated Press NEW YORK (AP) -- Only a handful of Super Bowl commercial slots are available with 6 1/2 weeks left until next month's game despite the 23 percent price increase that Fox posted for admission to the telecast. Network officials said Wednesday that four 30-second ads priced at $1.6 million each remained unsold out of an inventory of 58 ad slots on the Super Bowl telecast set for Jan. 31 in Miami. Fox said four or five advertisers were discussing buying the slots. ''I anticipate we will be sold out well prior to game time,'' said Jon Nesvig, president of sales for the Fox Broadcasting Co. The pace of sales has been slower than NBC set last year when it sold out its Super Bowl ads two months ahead of the game. But Fox is getting a much higher price than the $1.3 million NBC charged. The main reason for higher prices is that advertisers can still count on the Super Bowl telecast to reliably deliver the biggest television audience of the year. Even as the broadcast networks capture slimmer shares of the overall TV audience, the National Football League's championship game draws in excess of 100 million viewers each year. The telecast has also become the place to show off new campaigns and products, and audiences have come to expect to see Madison Avenue's best work during the Super Bowl. ''It's event television,'' said Bill Croasdale, the top network ad buyer at Western International Media. He said advertisers who buy into the Super Bowl are telling their ''sales force, customers and stock holders that you are playing in the big leagues.'' Croasdale and other ad buyers say a number of factors converged to help Fox command the unusually steep price hike. Super Bowl ad prices had been rising by single digit percentages in recent years. Some cited the record price of $1.7 million that NBC got for half-minute commercial slots on the last episode of ''Seinfeld'' last spring. '' 'Seinfeld' set the new high water mark,'' said Steve Grubbs, a top commercial buyer for the advertising agency BBDO Worldwide. ''People were saying the Super Bowl is worth more than the last episode of 'Seinfeld' because it generates more eyeballs,'' he said. That is borne out by the TV ratings. Nielsen Media Research said the May 14 episode of ''Seinfeld'' got a rating of 41.3 compared with 44.5 for the last Super Bowl game in which Denver defeated Green Bay. Each rating point represents 994,000 households. Other media buyers said published reports in late summer that Anheuser-Busch Cos. paid up to $2 million each for 10 spots to retain its place as the only beer advertiser on the Super Bowl helped Fox get a high price for other Super Bowl ads. Fox and the St. Louis-based brewer have each declined comment on those reports. Ad demand from movie companies anxious to create a buzz for new releases and from growing technology concerns also helped fuel this year's price increase, ad buyers said. Two companies that offer job postings on Internet web sites, Hotjobs.com and TMP Worldwide's Monsterboard, have bought their first Super Bowl spots, moving into the elite company of regulars like AT&T, Visa, Pepsi and General Motors. Nesvig said he expects 27 or 28 different advertisers will be in the game and that 15 percent to 20 percent will be companies that weren't in last time. Competition also helps keep ad prices up. Seven-Up is launching a new ad campaign with a spot on the Super Bowl so Coca-Cola's decision to sit this game out won't leave Pepsi-Cola as the lone soft drink advertiser. There are also multiple automobile and credit card sponsors. The higher prices are good news to Fox, which is in the first year of a $550 million contract to carry National Football Conference games. It gets two Super Bowls as part of that five-year package. In addition to the higher prices for ads in the game, Fox has extended its pre-game Super Bowl coverage by two hours from NBC's five hours last year. ''I think they have done spectacularly,'' said Western Media's Croasdale. ''The Super Bowl will be a big financial success for Fox.'' Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company