As about 78,000 fans gathered at Alltel Stadium on Sunday to watch the first Super Bowl ever held in Jacksonville, Fla., more than 100 million viewers positioned themselves in front of television sets awaiting the most-watched sporting event in history. Broadcast on the FOX network, this battle between the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles also brought the much-anticipated grab for consumer dollars, and at a hefty price.
At about $80,000 per second of commercial advertising, big-name companies such as Anheuser-Busch and PepsiCo, who together bought seven-and-a-half minutes of advertising, faced off with smaller companies such as FedEx, which took a 45-second piece of the 59 30-second commercial units offered. FOX is expected to rake in an estimated $140 million in advertising revenue, according to The
Associated Press.
In a conservative swing to avoid an incident akin to last year’s “wardrobe malfunction,” which had CBS saddled with a $550,000 fine by the Federal Communications Commission, Super Bowl organizers booked ex-Beatle Paul McCartney, 63, for 12 minutes of good, clean, half-time entertainment.
“It’s a great honor to do this,” McCartney said at a February press conference announcing his intention to perform. “People may have concerns of another wardrobe malfunction, but I can safely tell you that I won’t.”
Advertisers have followed suit. According to a New York Times report, the Ford Motor Company on Wednesday withdrew a commercial after receiving complaints that it made light of the recent string of Catholic Church sexual abuse cases. The commercial showed how a girl’s prank caused a member of clergy to be tempted by a Lincoln pickup. A Lincoln-Mercury spokeswoman told the Times that the company wanted the attention to be focused on the truck, not on possible parallels to the controversy.
Although much of the Super Bowl commercial content (which can be seen online at dyn.ifilm.com/superbowlads/) was overly watered down with child-friendly ads featuring the Muppets for Pizza Hut, M.C. Hammer for Lay’s potato chips, a stable full of Marvel superheroes for Visa and the Jolly Green Giant for MasterCard, there were
some highlights.
Our favorites:
FedEx’s “ten items needed to come out on top” featuring actor Burt Reynolds and a dancing, talking, groin-kicking bear, hit all the notes to be the best commercial of the Super Bowl (as promised). The tongue-in-cheek mockery of the Super Bowl’s advertising insanity was refreshing and
disturbingly accurate.
Ameriquest Mortgage Company’s tagline “Don’t judge too quickly. We won’t.” was perfectly paired with a set of hilarious ads that put innocent people in situations easily taken out of context: A girlfriend walking in on a boyfriend holding a clumsy cat and a large knife over a spilled saucepot of tomato sauce was a winner among this company’s champions.
Diet Pepsi, like FedEx, was at it’s best when in self-depreciation mode: When singer Sean “P. Diddy” Combs arrives at a premiere in a Diet Pepsi truck (after his own slick car broke down, of course) the vehicle soon becomes a must-have commodity, and Carson Daly makes an appearance playing up his
reputation as a poseur.

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