Super Bowl Ads Aired After Halftime Took a Beating Too

When Nike’s Super Bowl ad, featuring a parade of sports announcers, accidentally aired throughout Canada last week, Nike officials were horrified. And then, when CBS balked at broadcasting the ad because it featured announcers from rival networks, an embarrassed Nike garnered even more publicity when it had to quickly re-shoot portions of it.

Now, in light of Sunday’s Super Bowl blowout--and the fact that the Nike commercial didn’t even air until the fourth quarter--some Nike executives wonder if the snafus, which took place long before San Francisco’s lopsided 55-10 victory over Denver, weren’t blessings in disguise.

“As the game went down the tubes before halftime, I was glad we had already gotten more than $1.4 million worth of publicity for it,” said Nike spokeswoman Elizabeth Dolan, refering to the cost to air the 60-second spot. Some of that publicity was garnered when Nike sent snippets of the ad to sportscasters at TV stations nationwide.

Although final Nielsen Media Research ratings won’t be available until today, the New York-based firm gave some early indications Monday that by Super Bowl standards, viewership for Sunday’s game was mediocre, at best. But despite an expected falling off of viewership during the second half of the game, advertisers from Nike to Pepsi generally say they have no plans to seek so-called make-goods for compensatory commercial time from CBS.

“You buy what you buy,” said Michele Szynal, a spokeswoman for Gillette, which premiered several new ads during the broadcast. “Sometimes you get a blowout and sometimes you get a squeaker. There are no guarantees, and we knew that going in.”

This Super Bowl hardly kept TV viewers glued to their sets. Nielsen’s “overnight” sampling of 23 major markets--including Los Angeles and New York--would seem to indicate that last year’s Super Bowl, in which San Francisco beat Cincinnati 20-16 in the final seconds, attracted a larger audience.

In the 23 markets, this year’s Super Bowl posted a rating of 39.6--which refers to the percentage of viewers in total U.S households. In last year’s national Nielsens, which usually do not differ greatly from the overnight figures, the game rated considerably higher at 43.5. Also in the 23 markets this year, Nielsen reports that 63% of the TV sets in use during the game were at some time tuned in to the Super Bowl. That is considerably lower than last year’s national figure of 68%.

Nielsen did not have statistics available Monday on how many people actually watched Sunday’s contest. Executives from CBS declined to comment.

“If we had it to do over again, we would probably prefer to have all our ads in the first half,” said Kenneth Chenault, president of the American Express corporate card group. American Express aired a commercial just before the game--and during the fourth quarter--that featured Paul Newman in his U.S. debut as a pitchman.

But Pepsi, which aired two commercials in the third quarter, said that even if viewership fell off by then, it still had lucky timing with one ad that featured Joe Montana. The ad appeared on the screen seconds after Montana tossed a touchdown pass.

And while Anheuser-Busch officials say they would have prefered a closer contest, they’re not complaining. During the past two Super Bowls, they’ve run a series of animated ads for the “Bud Bowl” that feature the Budweiser brand playing Bud Light on the gridiron. And even though some advertising critics have panned this year’s version of the Bud Bowl, Budweiser officials aren’t crying in their beer. When the Super Bowl is a blowout, said Tony Ponturo, director of media at Anheuser-Busch, many sports writers and TV sportscasters like to point out that the “Bud Bowl” was a better contest than the Super Bowl.