Taken out of the game

Honey, come quick, the Super Bowl commercials are on!

There’s country legend Willie Nelson with his H&R; Block tax advice doll; Monster is back, as are Super Bowl ad reliables such as Pepsi, General Motors and Budweiser.

But look what’s not on: This year, CBS has banned advertisements from the political action group MoveOn.org, the nonprofit animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the city of Las Vegas. The network said Sin City’s ad would violate the network’s advocacy policies and would breach its contract with the National Football League. But the three advertisements Super Bowl viewers will not see have garnered plenty of media attention.

With four days until Super Bowl XXXVIII, the hype -- at least in some quarters -- is just as much about the 30- to 60-second commercials CBS will air or reject as it is about the NFL championship game between the New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers.

Super Bowl ads now cost an all-time high of $2.3 million on average for a 30-second spot. But that hasn’t stopped MoveOn or PETA from angling to get in with the major marketers. And no wonder. Since Apple Computers aired -- for the first and only time -- its widely revered Big Brother hommage to launch the then-new Macintosh computer during the 1984 Super Bowl, the NFL championship has become the premier advertising showcase.

Such is its importance that even being turned down for a slot in the Super Bowl might not be a total defeat.

Christie Brown, a University of Michigan assistant professor of marketing who was an advertiser before she switched to academia 11 years ago, notes that advocacy groups can use their ads’ rejection as an opportunity for guerrilla marketing. “A cynical person might say they get almost as much mileage from getting rejected as from actually paying the $2 million and going on air,” Brown said. “That might actually make it more interesting than if it was tucked between ads for beer and an erectile dysfunction drug.”

That logic doesn’t concern the NFL, which for the second year in a row has turned down the 30-second ad from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. This year’s commercial would have compared Sin City to a football game, without mentioning gambling.

“Las Vegas is synonymous to the public with sports betting and casino gambling and this is the one advertising area we prohibit in our contracts with our network partners,” said NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said. “This type of advertising has the potential to negatively impact the perception of the integrity of our game. We turn them down every single year.”

MoveOn.org, a left-leaning Internet-based political action group, raised more than half of the money needed to run the group’s 30-second spot that features children laboring as dishwashers, factory workers and garbage collectors and ends with the somber, rhetorical question: “Guess who’s going to pay off President Bush’s $1-trillion deficit?” CBS executives turned the spot down, citing a long-standing policy that prohibits commercials taking stands on public-policy issues. The ad, called “Child’s Pay,” won MoveOn’s national advertising contest to create a spot that would best attack the Bush administration’s policies.

“We find it totally unfair that they are running ads from the White House Office of National Drug Policy but not ours,” said MoveOn’s campaign director, Eli Pariser. “I don’t understand why it’s controversial to say we have a $1-trillion deficit but it’s not controversial to blame America’s potheads for terrorism.”

Last year, a drug policy advertisement that aired during the Super Bowl linked drug sales to international terrorism. This year, Viacom, which owns CBS, and the Kaiser Family Foundation will kick off the “Know HIV/AIDS” campaign during the pregame show with the first HIV-prevention and AIDS awareness spot to air in connection with the game.

“It always depends on the spot, but we consider [the MoveOn.org spot] to be advocacy advertising because they are looking to sway public opinion in the matter of public policy debate,” said Dana McClintock, CBS senior vice president for communications. “The White House ads are trying to stamp out drug abuse. There’s not a reasonable ad out there for why we should be for drug abuse.”

A spokesman for PETA says CBS’ policy “doesn’t hold water” because of ads broadcast during previous Super Bowls, such as former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole’s Viagra commercials. PETA’s 30-second spot is part of a campaign that says that eating meat causes impotence because it clogs the arteries to all organs, not just the heart. The network’s Jan. 5 rejection letter states that the ad “raises significant taste concerns and has strong potential to offend significant numbers of viewers.”

At the other end of the spectrum are repeat customers such as Monster and H&R; Block, which join the other advertisers aiming to go down in history with such classics as “Mean” Joe Greene’s Coke ad, Noxema’s “Take It All Off” and the “Wassup?” ads for Budweiser.

Last year’s Willie Nelson bit was so effective that H&R; Block turned to the singer with well-known IRS troubles again this year, said Karl Ploeger, vice president of creative and media services at H&R; Block.

“He’s a great sport and the Super Bowl has become quite a spectacle,” Ploeger said. “The game is almost the break now. We always try to interject an element of entertainment and cleverness because you want to capture somebody’s attention.”

But that may not be enough, Brown warns. “Last year, the day after the Super Bowl, I asked my students to name their favorite ad,” she said. “A lot of them named Reebok’s 300-pound linebacker who clobbered people who weren’t behaving. It was extremely memorable but most students couldn’t remember the product or the brand.”

This year, Monster allotted more of its $125-million advertising budget to the Super Bowl, buying one pregame spot and two spots during the game because the company’s first Super Bowl commercial six years ago “was the defining moment for the Monster brand,” said founder Jeff Taylor. More than 22,000 people posted resumes on the website within 48 hours of the commercial’s broadcast.

“The Super Bowl has been a great platform for us, because if you look at our business, we are a little less dot-com and a little more Monster now,” he said. “People actually go online and go to Monster right after our commercial. It’s the only time of year that people watch the commercials as content.”