Super Bowl Advertisers on the Alert
By STUART ELLIOTT

Published: January 10, 2005

EITHER the outcry over the content of Super Bowl commercials last year nor the fallout from the episode involving Janet Jackson during the halftime show have deterred a lengthy list of blue-chip marketers from signing up as sponsors this year.

Still, the advertisers, which are paying record prices to appear during the game to be broadcast by Fox on Feb. 6, are paying close attention to the tone and tenor of their commercials. The marketers, which include Anheuser-Busch, Ford Motor, General Motors and McDonald's, are anxious to avoid a repeat of the vociferous complaints generated by last year's spots. Some were centered on erectile dysfunction, while others featured characters like a flatulent horse, a crotch-biting dog, a Scotsman who wore nothing under his kilt, a male monkey wooing a human female, an elderly couple fighting over a bag of potato chips and a man who mistakenly underwent a bikini-wax treatment.

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"When you try to do something that stands out in a game full of advertisers trying to stand out, you have to walk a line," said David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer at BBDO North America in New York. "And some people walked over it last year."

BBDO North America, part of the BBDO Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group, is creating campaigns for several sponsors of Super Bowl XXXIX next month, including FedEx and Visa. "I don't think anybody goes in saying, 'Let's do spots in bad taste that will offend everyone,' " Mr. Lubars said, adding: "Last year, people thought their spots would be funny like they were in past years. But they just didn't work out."

One reason could be that the controversy caused by Ms. Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII last February seemed to have amplified the reaction against commercials deemed to be tasteless. They included spots for two prescription drugs, Cialis and Levitra, that treat erectile dysfunction, as well as for products like Bud Light beer, Lay's potato chips and Sierra Mist soda.

"You won't see some of the more 'out there' creative you saw last year," said Rick Dudley, president and chief executive at Octagon Worldwide in New York, a sports marketing agency owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies.

"This is going to be a big 'G for general rating' Super Bowl," he added. "Long term, people will loosen up a little, but short term, they'll pull in their reins."

That attitude is reflected in the approach being taken by several Super Bowl sponsors.

"We're not going after stupid jokes or bad humor," said Martin Lee, vice president for marketing at Olympus Imaging America in Melville, N.Y., a division of the Olympus Corporation that will run two commercials during the game for a new product, the m:robe 500 digital music player and camera.

"We're looking for our ads to be engaging and entertaining," he added, "and maybe get people to get up and dance a little." The commercials, by the Martin Agency in Richmond, Va., owned by Interpublic, carry the theme "Let your pictures groove" and are styled like music video clips. They are the first Super Bowl spots for Olympus since 1981.

One first-time Super Bowl advertiser, the MBNA Corporation, is featuring in its commercial an old-school singer, Gladys Knight, whose performance is highly unlikely to evoke comparisons to Ms. Jackson's.

"Nothing about our campaign would raise those concerns" that plagued advertisers last year, said Mark Levitt, senior executive vice president and director for brand development at MBNA in Wilmington, Del.

The MBNA commercial, by the Helm Agency in New York, part of the WPP Group, will carry the theme "If you're into it, we're into it," referring to MBNA's specialty of issuing affinity credit cards cosponsored by charities, universities, clubs and organizations.

Other marketers making their Super Bowl debuts include CareerBuilder.com, a job-search Web site; the Ciba Vision unit of Novartis; and GoDaddy.com, which registers Internet domain names.

"There's no doubt this year the advertisers, and the halftime performers, are on a short leash," said Bob Parsons, president at GoDaddy.com in Scottsdale, Ariz., part of the GoDaddy Group, whose commercial is being created by the Ad Store in New York.

"But that works for us as much as it works against us," he added, because "people are going to be very interested in watching how this year is going to compare" with last year.

Mr. Parsons said he was also not deterred by the record price for commercial time, averaging $2.4 million for each 30 seconds, up 4.3 percent from the average price of $2.3 million that advertisers paid CBS for Super Bowl XXXVIII.

"People who don't do business with us don't know us, so we're stepping up to an aggressive marketing program to reach those people," Mr. Parsons said. "And we thought, what better way to kick it off than the Super Bowl?"

Mr. Parsons recently made a similar argument in comments he posted on a Web log, Brand Autopsy (brandautopsy.typepad.com), which had urged him not to advertise on the Super Bowl. In his posting, as in his interview, Mr. Parsons said the Super Bowl spot would be only the beginning of the GoDaddy.com campaign, not the entire campaign, as was the case for so many busted dot-coms in 2000.

For every GoDaddy.com, there is an America Online, H&R Block or Monster Worldwide, advertisers that are sitting out Super Bowl XXXIX after buying commercials last time.

The absence of Monster Worldwide after six consecutive years as a Super Bowl sponsor is not a reflection of the value of the game as an advertising venue, said Jeff Taylor, the company's founder, nor is it a reaction to the controversy last year when Ms. Jackson's bared breast appeared onscreen. Monster, which sponsored the halftime report after her performance with Justin Timberlake, "took 30 calls into our front desk," he recalled, "asking, 'Why did you do that?' "

Mr. Taylor, who goes by the title chief monster, said the departure from the Super Bowl represented a shift in Monster's marketing strategy to concentrate on ads in local media in local markets.

"The Super Bowl is very credible for broad-brush advertising, to get buzz going, but we now have more than 90 percent brand awareness in the U.S.," Mr. Taylor said, "so we're putting our focus on the top 50 markets," as illustrated by a deal to run commercials by Deutsch in New York, part of Interpublic, on 180 radio stations owned by the Infinity Broadcasting division of Viacom.

Fox Broadcasting, part of the News Corporation, has sold about 90 percent of the commercial time that it plans to sell, leaving only 5 or 6 of the 59 30-second spots scheduled to run during the game to be sold. That pace is well ahead of where Fox was when it last broadcast a Super Bowl, in 2002, when it did not sell all the commercial time until the Thursday before Super Bowl Sunday.

Among other sponsors that have been identified are the American Honda Motor division of Honda Motor; Ameriquest Mortgage, the sponsor of the halftime show; the Buena Vista Pictures unit of Walt Disney; the Frito-Lay and Pepsi-Cola divisions of PepsiCo; the MGM and Sony Pictures units of Sony; Paramount Pictures, part of Viacom; Tabasco sauce, sold by the McIlhenny Company; the Universal Pictures division of NBC Universal, part of General Electric; and the Warner Brothers unit of Time Warner.

One brand that will not be among them is Airborne, a cold remedy sold by Knight-McDowell Labs, which submitted to Fox a humorous commercial that included a brief glimpse of the backside of the actor Mickey Rooney. The joke: Mr. Rooney, in a sauna, is so startled by someone's cough that he drops his towel. The Fox standards and practices department rejected the spot as inappropriate, USA Today reported on Friday.

Even if Ms. Jackson's wardrobe had not malfunctioned last year, there is little likelihood that Fox - or any network, for that matter - would have accepted the Airborne commercial, because hindquarters glimpsed in ads almost always belong to infants. Mr. Rooney is 84.

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