The Super Bowl’s Super-expensive Advertising: Does It Work?
For the advertising industry and millions of television viewers, the upcoming Super Bowl broadcast, scheduled for Jan. 26 in San Diego, will be a string of entertaining commercials interrupted from time to time by a football game. More than 40 million people are expected to watch this year’s super-hyped championship contest and digest as many as 60 commercials along with their nachos, sour cream-onion dip and Buffalo wings. “This is advertising’s greatest moment. It’s when the light is shining brightest on advertising creativity,” says Rob DiGisi, a Wharton sports and entertainment marketing lecturer and president of Ironhorse Marketing Inc. in Wilmington, Del. Super Bowl commercials have transcended their marketing function and are now viewed as a cultural reflection of America at a particular moment in time. During the height of the dot.com era, the ads celebrated young and irreverent slacker-millionaires; in 2001, just months after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washingt
