Super Bowl Is <i> the Event</i> in Ad Game

Sears executives figured that in a three-hour period, Super Bowl television viewers could only make so many trips to the kitchen.

So last year, when Sears Roebuck & Co. introduced its new-fangled Discover Card during the Super Bowl, it covered all the bases--and hashmarks. It spent $3.2 million on six commercials that let the world know it was about to give Visa and MasterCard a run for the credit card customer’s money.

But this year, it’s a new ball game.

Sears will not have even one Super Bowl commercial. But that’s not because, at $600,000 per 30-second time slot, the retail giant can’t afford it. It’s because the Super Bowl--which reaches 45% of the households in America, and an estimated 120 million viewers--is fast-evolving into a platform for introducing new products and new advertising campaigns. With nothing requiring the national hoopla that accompanied the Discover Card, Sears will be sitting out this year’s game.

“If you’re a company with a major announcement to make,” said Bill Cora, national retail ad director at Sears Merchandising Group, “you have to at least look at the Super Bowl as a platform.” Among the major corporations expected to break new ad campaigns on Super Bowl day are McDonalds Corp., Merrill Lynch, Travelers Insurance and Seiko Time Corp.

Although the Super Bowl is still viewed as the advertiser’s ultimate ego trip, ad industry executives say the ever-spiraling cost of the ads for The Game is forcing even the biggest corporations to only climb onto the Super Bowl stage only when their advertisements are, in fact, newsworthy.

“Super Bowl advertisements have become events in themselves,” said Greg Helm, general manager of Chiat/Day’s Los Angeles office. “When people find out that I work for an ad agency, the first thing they ask me is if I created an ad on the Super Bowl this year.”

His company did not. But in 1984, Chiat/Day started the trend when it produced an extravagant commercial for Apple Computer, when the firm first introduced its Macintosh computer. But this year, Apple is sitting out the Super Bowl. “We have no message that lends itself to that kind of showcase,” said Bruce Mowery, Apple’s advertising manager.

International Business Machines, however, is expected to unveil its newest-model computer on Super Bowl Sunday this year, although the company will not confirm that. But instead of paying the big bucks for game-time ads, IBM has primarily purchased pre-game and post-game time slots, said a company spokesman. “We expect most of the viewers will still be there,” the spokesman said.

Others, too, are finding ways around the high costs of the 52 commercial slots--sold in 30-second segments. Some, for example, are trying to broaden their impact--without spending a nickel more--by breaking their time slots into two 15-seconds segments. In fact, this will mark the first time that national, 15-second spots have been placed on the Super Bowl, said Jerome Dominus, vice president of advertising sales at CBS. “They’ll essentially get two exposures for the price of one,” said Dominus.

There are also those companies that turn to the Super Bowl because it best reaches that all-important audience that nothing else can reach quite as well--men.

For example, it has been five years since Federal Express advertised during a Super Bowl, and this year it has no new product to introduce. But because Federal Express is used by such a largely male audience, it still plans to advertise at this year’s game, said Nancy Altenberg, director of advertising. “Besides,” she said, “it has the biggest audience of any vehicle on TV.”

For Japanese Yuppies

At first glance, it looks like any other Sharper Image catalogue--its pages plastered with high-tech widgets and pricey presents. But closer inspection reveals a different world, or at least, a different country. It is the Sharper Image’s premiere Japanese edition. About 200,000 copies of the 22-page, English-Japanese catalogue were recently mailed to Japanese professionals who want to buy with all the panache of American yuppies.

Although the Japanese follow the Swiss and Germans--who were introduced to Sharper Image over the past three years--in the early weeks the Japanese are buying biggest of all. “They’re much more enthusiastic about American ideas than the Europeans,” said Richard Thalheimer, president and founder of Sharper Image.

Japanese buyers are scooping up items like high-tech exercise equipment and Ferrari-brand watches. But one $100 item isn’t selling at all, Thalheimer said, and it will be dumped from the next Japanese edition: “Golf My Way”--a two-hour video golf lesson by Jack Nicklaus.

Wished for Too Much

All they ask is one can a week.

You’ve seen the real-life almond growers on TV--standing belly-high in a barn of 2.5 million almonds. Well, what if the California Almond Growers Exchange got their clever commercial wish? Suppose all 230 million U.S. citizens did their patriotic duty and ate a can of almonds every seven days?

“We don’t even have enough to go around,” says Susan Valdes, a spokeswoman for the group. If the can-a-week dream became reality, annual sales would jump to 10.4 billion cans. The problem is, not nearly that many cans are available. In fact, if every available almond was sold, that would total just 645 million cans.

U.S. citizens could clean out the entire almond crop by eating three cans a year--not even close to the can-a-week that the farmers ask. And it may not be that tough a nut to crack--Americans already munch their way through 500 million cans a year.

The $7-million ad campaign was created by the San Francisco office of the ad firm Dancer Fitzgerald Sample Inc. One of the farmers, Don McKinney--who owns a 110-acre almond orchard just north of Fresno in Madera, Calif.--found out that acting doesn’t come easy. In the commercial, the men appear to be standing in mounds of almonds, but they are actually standing in barrels that were then hidden beneath the almonds. Said McKinney: “It took us longer to get in and out of the barrels than to film the commercial.”

New Business Weekly

If you can’t buy one, start one.

At least, that is the attitude at Crain Communications of Chicago, which failed in a recent bid to purchase Los Angeles Business Journal. Instead, by fall, it plans to create Crain’s Los Angeles Business, which Crain will add to its growing network of business weeklies. But Crain isn’t entering Los Angeles on a lark. “We need to be in Los Angeles in order pick up more national advertising,” said Rance Crain, the company’s publisher and president.

Crain now owns business publications in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and New York. But to attract big-ticket, national advertisers--which now comprise about 20% of the publication’s ads--the company needs a presence in the nation’s second-largest market, Rance Crain said.

The move will not come cheaply. It could cost $10 million to set up the Los Angeles publication, he said. The year-old New York weekly, which is also costing about $10 million to get off the ground, is still in the red, he said. The company will use profits from its 25 other publications--which include Advertising Age and Automotive News--to finance the venture, Crain said.

But there might not be room in Los Angeles for two weekly business newspapers, said Don Miller, executive officer at Kansas City, Mo.-based American City Business Journals, which owns Los Angeles Business Journal. “Businessmen only have so much time to read.”