Onfield Thriller Overshadows Super Bowl Ads

Reuters News Service
Adam Pasick
02/04/2002

NEW YORK, Feb 4 (Reuters) - A nail-biting finish to Super Bowl XXXVI gave advertisers their money's worth on Sunday night as the onfield action - which has often taken a back seat to the commercials - kept viewers watching right to the final seconds.

But although the New England Patriots' last-minute victory over the heavily favored St. Louis Rams was immediately hailed as a gridiron classic, the lackluster ads, industry analysts said, did not measure up to the caliber of the game.

"For the first time in a long time, the conversation is much more about the game than the ads," said David Blum of Eisner Communications.

A study by Eisner last week found that more than 10 percent of Super Bowl viewers - the highest percentage in the study's 11-year history - tuned in just to see the game's high-profile commercials.

Leading the pack in visibility and popularity was brewer Anheuser-Busch, whose 10 ads ran the gamut from humor, in the form of slapstick mishaps featuring slippery satin sheets, to patriotic sentiment, as the celebrated Budweiser Clydesdale horses paid an unexpected tribute to New York City and the Sept. 11 attacks.

Four Anheuser-Busch ads - the satin sheet debacle, a pet falcon trained to "fetch" Bud Light, an attempt to play a bar-room Cyrano de Bergerac gone awry, and a seemingly mismatched battle of robots - were among the top five most popular, according to USA Today , which polled 118 viewers during the game.

"Humor and animals always sell," said Andrew Bergstein, an instructor of marketing at Penn State's Smeal College of Business.

Other well-received ads included a spot for brokerage firm Charles Schwab featuring baseball greats, slugger Barry Bonds and all-time homerun champ Hank Aaron; an off-beat "crazy legs" commercial for Levi Strauss jeans from "Being John Malkovich" director Spike Jonze and a commercial for video chain Blockbuster showing an animated guinea pig and bunny sharing a pet store cage and "shaking what their mamas gave them."

This year's advertisers spent up to $2 million each to air their commercials. Broadcaster Fox, however, was forced to make discounts in the days leading up to the game itself, hurt by a soft advertising climate and competition from the Winter Olympic Games, which begin Feb. 8.

For the huge amounts of money spent on ads, not much new ground was broken, said Mark DiMassimo of DiMassimo Brand Advertising.

"Advertising has got 30 to 60 seconds to surprise the hell out of you, to truly rivet your attention," he said. "The Budweiser commercials were funny, but on the average - sitcom gags - certainly not a breakthrough."

Among the losers for the evening, many singled out PepsiCo's retro spots with teen diva Britney Spears revisiting Pepsi advertising through the years.

"Pepsi made their relationship with Britney the center of their advertising rather than an idea," said DiMassimo. "It was probably better for Britney than for Pepsi."

AT&T Wireless' teaser ads for its "mLife" campaign also received criticism for their opaque, if rather clever, approach on cutting cords - both phone and umbilical.

"If you want to tease people, you'd better pay off," Bergstein said.

Perhaps the most contentious Super Bowl commercials were those that made overt or implicit connections to the events of Sept. 11: Budweiser's Clydesdales, Monster.com's spotlighting former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and two thought-provoking ads from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy that linked terrorism with drug use.

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REPORTERS & EDITORS: For more information, please contact Wyatt DuBois in the Smeal College of Business Media Relations Office at 814-863-3798 or wed112@psu.edu .

Penn State's Smeal College of Business offers highly ranked undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, Ph.D., and executive education opportunities to more than 5,500 students at all levels. Featuring academic departments of accounting, finance, marketing, insurance and real estate, management, and supply chain and information systems, the college is also home to major research centers such as the Center for Supply Chain Research, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, the eBusiness Research Center, the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Center for Global Business Studies, and the Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change.

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