Yet a week from Sunday, no locks will repel speeding bullets. Master Lock says it is changing strategy, and that “the trend in Super Bowl advertising has been to entertaining, even humorous commercials, which is not an appropriate environment for a security product.” Conjuring fearsome visions of crime and mayhem apparently wasn’t mingling well with funny frogs and supermodels munching snack food.
But several advertisers insist there’s another motive. “I believe that there was a discussion at Master Lock that they’d get a lot of attention for not being in the Super Bowl,” says one, Bob Brennan, head of U.S. media at Leo Burnett. And he may be right. We have come to this: it’s not embracing the Super Bowl that’s remarkable; it’s daring to walk away.
A few years ago you could still faintly make out the sound of wheels turning, executives sitting around conference ta- bles manufacturing a colossal marketing “event.” The pretentious Roman numerals, the kitschy half-time shows, the corporate excess, the Bud Bowl. But by now the legacy of late commissioner Pete Rozelle is complete. All of a sudden, you can’t see the little elves cobbling it together anymore. It simply exists, bigger than life.
Frozen in amber somewhere is the image of Americans doing things like stopping in their tracks at 11 a.m. on Armistice Day as bells rang to honor war dead. Now there’s really only one true communal ritual left. To merely say that the Super Bowl is far and away America’s biggest television event isn’t enough. To call it a “manufactured holiday” doesn’t quite do it, either. You can argue now that it has become our pre-eminent secular holiday: the Fourth of July is getting stuck in beach traffic; New Year’s Eve is about alcohol; Halloween rots your teeth. Thanksgiving, maybe, you can debate, but statistically, Hallmark Cards says, Super Sunday generates more social gatherings than any other occasion.
That’s why the great corporations of America are so desperate to mind-meld with it. As the rest of media becomes more and more chopped into slivers, as ratings of even the most popular television series continue to decline steeply, this is the one big TV tent that hasn’t collapsed. The ratings vary but hardly ever budge from the 40s, meaning that just shy of half the homes with TV sets have the game on; nearly 140 million viewers tune in at some point. What’s more, the Super Bowl is the only truly wide target left. The Academy Awards still skew toward older women. The World Series is older men. The Super Bowl is No. 1 in every group. “Men, women, young, old, rich, poor and in between,” says Phil Dusenberry, chairman of BBDO New York.
But the main thing, of course, is that the ads are the show itself. People assemble, happily and attentively, to watch what they find profoundly irritating the rest of the year. Super Sunday might be the one time that television tells the truth about itself–that TV programming really is just baling wire strung up to exhibit the commercials. The advertisers proud- ly stride to center stage. “It’s what people are talking about the next morning at the office–not what happened in the second quarter,” says Marvin Sloves, chairman of Lowe and Partners/SMS.
More than that, the advertisers are competing in their own parallel Super Bowl. USA Today, the one newspaper that’s not uncomfortable with the invention of television, covers this contest of the admeisters with obsessive thoroughness. The first stories about this year’s ads began running last August. All of this culminates in the newspaper’s “Ad Meter” survey, where viewers are polled moment by moment for their reactions. (Pepsi has the best recent record.) This year Fox will actually announce the results after the game.
The ad people are pursuing the holy grail, the fabled Apple “1984” commercial, which aired only once and can be blamed for an entire school of epic-sounding commercials that don’t appear to make any sense. Now the trend, as Master Lock noted, is to be funny. In the way that movie comedies play better in crowded theaters, big groups consuming beverages want punch lines. Warm and fuzzy is better for the Olympics, when the ads repeat for 17 days, and when the network collaborates by playing up the emotional story lines of the Games in an effort to attract female viewers.
Super Bowl advertisers pay premiums far higher than even the huge ratings warrant. This year the 58 slots available clocked in at an average of $1.2 million for every 30 seconds. Fox is broadcasting the game for the first time, after paying an astonishing $1.6 billion for the rights to air football, and it is getting a payoff of $70 million, plus mil- lions for the five hours of pregame program- ming. Then there’s the slot after the game. Producers have used it to launch new shows; that’s how “The A-Team” and “The Wonder Years” got their starts. But even more shows squandered their enormous sampling. Last year NBC decided to take the money and run, scheduling a special episode of “Friends”–with stunt casting like Julia Roberts–and got the biggest num- ber for any series episode in three years.
Fox is doing the same thing. Its most popular show, “The X-Files,” will air, but without the bells and whistles. “We’re not doing anything out of the ordinary,” creator Chris Carter says firmly. He knows his cultishly loyal base wouldn’t countenance pandering. The network has, however, expressed mild concern about “body parts.”
Master Lock or no, the lineup of Super Bowl advertisers this year includes the perennial mass marketers who like to weave themselves into the Zeitgeist of Americana: Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi, Nike, the car companies. But there are some special entrants. You’ve probably never heard of a company called Auto-By-Tel, which sells cars online. This will change. Intel may be the most successful company in America, but it’s never advertised on the Super Bowl; much of high-tech advertising has been aimed at business customers. But Intel has a new computer chip, MMX, and a new logo to go with it. It wants everybody to know.
Then there’s Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners, which last week held a news conference with Fred Astaire’s widow, Robyn. They were touting a commercial that will debut during the Super Bowl showing Fred Astaire dancing with . . . oh, forget it: you’ll see it on the show.
THE COLOR OF MONEY
The audience for the Super Bowl is huge, and advertisers pay premium prices. This year’s game will cost an avaerage of $1.2 million for every 30-second segment.
1997 Super bowl Advertisers, Minutes Purchased Anheuser-Busch 4 Pepsi 3 Oscar Mayer 1.5 Porche 1.5 Coca-Cola 1 Fox Film Studio 1 Honda 1 Nike 1 Nissan 1 Paramount 1
