Anyone who watches NFL football in the postseason is well accustomed to the pre-game puffery that precedes each game. NFL officials on the field can’t even flip a coin until Terry Bradshaw and Dan Marino have weighed in with their amusing trifles, locker room banter, and over-thought analysis. By the time the Super Bowl arrives, the pre-game show has taken a life of its own, a veritable pageant of everything football that’s guaranteed to last longer than a Brett Favre deposition.
When it comes to Super Bowl hype, we can’t leave the TV commercials out of the conversation. For many viewers the ads have become as important as the game itself. Maybe more. So why not a pre-game show that focuses on the advertising? The material is certainly available to anyone who wants it. Just go to www.superbowl-commercials.org for this year’s line up of advertising players.
Super Bowl veterans like Pepsi and Doritos will surely be fired up and ready for game day. But what will rookies like Best Buy have to do to make an impact in its first Super Bowl competition? And there’s sure to be some gridiron action coming from the roster of car companies this year going head to head for market superiority. After 60 minutes in the trenches, who remains standing? Will it be Audi, Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, or perhaps the upstart Carmax who’s making its debut as a national advertiser?
While we’re making ad prognostications we ought to consider the Las Vegas betting lines that are sure to follow. Bookmakers could be handicapping consumer response point spreads, calculating over-under totals on market share, and turning multiple product parlays into some interesting betting combinations. I’m already getting excited.
If football fans can watch beer bottles run a few scrimmages in the Bud Bowl, we’re certainly ready for James Brown breaking down the advertising strategies and tactics we’ll be seeing during official game timeouts. So let’s get with it Fox Sports (this year’s TV network host). Is there anything more competitive than Madison Avenue people facing off in the NFL trenches? I can almost hear the roar of the crowd as the announcer declares, “And now a word from our sponsor.”