The Super Bowl Blitz
Expands in Online Arena
Firms Try New Ways
To Tap the Big Game;
Extending the :30 Spot
By
EMILY STEEL
January 28, 2008; Page B4
The Super Bowl is still the ultimate traditional television event, but companies are exploring new ways to bring their ads online.
Marketers are going deeper into everything from Web video to profiles on social-networking sites. For companies forking over as much as $2.7 million for 30 seconds of television ad time during the game, the goal of the online push is to try to make that steep investment go further. The marketers that don't have a TV presence during the game hope to tap the Super Bowl's massive following on the cheap.
PepsiCo's Pepsi-Cola North America plans to bolster its TV spots with an ad blitz on
Yahoo this weekend.
Viacom's Paramount Pictures has secured a three-year Super Bowl package with ESPN.com to be the dominant advertiser on the site.
Verizon Communications, which has never bought a TV spot for the big game, is sponsoring AOL's Super Sunday Ad Poll, which lets visitors watch and rank the commercials that air during the game. Meanwhile, dozens of advertisers are bidding on search terms related to the Super Bowl through
Google.
Not that long ago, all Super Bowl advertising centered on game day, with the TV network that bought the broadcast rights to the game reaping all the ad revenue. But now it has turned into a weeks-long frenzy, with an increasing number of participants trying to profit from the action.
News Corp.'s Fox is airing the game this year, but it doesn't have a monopoly on the online Super Bowl audience. For months, ad-sales teams at companies from Google to Yahoo to
Walt Disney's ESPN -- all of which are featuring extensive pre- and post-Super Bowl coverage -- have been designing ad packages of their own.
Some of the sites are hosting, free, the Super Bowl commercials that run during the game. MySpace, which News Corp. owns, is posting all of the commercials broadcast during the game on a special section of the social-networking site at no extra charge to those advertisers. Google's YouTube,
Time Warner's AOL and Yahoo are doing the same for their commercial polls. Hosting those commercials helps the sites build viewer traffic, which then allows them to sell more paid advertising.
That paid advertising ranges from small banner ads on a network of sports-related sites to taking over all the ad space on a Web site. Prices can be as small as a $1 bid on a search keyword (if a person searches on that keyword, the advertiser's link shows up in the results) to hundreds of thousands of dollars to sponsor the sites.
t: Great start. 
