Super Bowl Showdown Advertisers Square Off On High-Priced Telecast

The Super Bowl XXXI roster is set. The players are anxious to show their stuff. Expectations are that a huge crowd will show up to watch.

The advertisers - not just the football teams - are ready for a showdown Sunday on a telecast that annually serves as the ad world’s showcase event.

Veteran Super Bowl commercial warriors like Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi and Nike are lined up with rookies like Fila shoes, Intel computer chips and Dirt Devil vacuums in a can-you-top-this pursuit of TV’s biggest audience.

On the field in the Louisiana Superdome, the Green Bay Packers and New England Patriots will decide the National Football League championship.

Fox Broadcasting says 30 advertisers paid a record average of about $1.2 million for a half-minute commercial during the game.

The advertisers are hoping for an audience in excess of 100 million viewers to justify the steep price as well as the frenzied effort that went into creating many of the commercials.

The brewer Anheuser-Busch has bought more time on the Super Bowl telecast than any other sponsor - four minutes - and pitches its bestselling Budweiser and Bud Light ads.

It leads off with a 60-second commercial called “Power Surge” that involves a fictional citywide power outage. The ad was directed by Breck Eisner, the son of Walt Disney Co. boss Michael Eisner.

In the brewer’s other ads, a Bud bottle drops into an unsuspecting caveman’s life, a chicken takes a star turn and two new characters are introduced to pitch Bud Light.

The Bud frogs have been limited to a fleeting cameo role in a pre-game commercial in which the winning number in the ninth annual Bud Bowl will be disclosed.

Models and other celebrities abound in Super Bowl ads.

Pepsi-Cola, which is introducing its “Generation Next” ad theme with three minutes of ingame commercials, has Pepsi-sipping models Cindy Crawford, Tyra Banks and Bridgette Hall peek into a hospital nursery in one commercial. They indelibly impress a newborn boy.

Crawford also appears in a commercial for Cadillac’s new Catera model, playing a princess rescued from boredom by an animated duck who has the keys to the new Caddy.