Canadians won’t see hyped Super Bowl ads
TORONTO — Canadians tuning into Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast will see the football game. They’ll also see the pre-game and halftime shows, with Shania Twain and Celine Dion among the big stars.
But they won’t get to see Ozzy Osbourne waking up in bed with Florence Henderson to pitch Pepsi Twist. Nor the orangutan doing the backstroke on behalf of Sierra Mist, a new soft drink. Nor the $85,000 diamond-laden pair of Levi Strauss jeans.
They’ll also miss Michael Jordan who, thanks to digital special effects, will play some basketball with his younger self in a Gatorade ad.
That’s because in Canada, Global TV has the broadcast rights to the ABC-TV program, including the right to insert its own commercials which, more often than not, are the same old ads one sees during the rest of the TV week, not the so-called “new creative” content airing south of the border.
Dave Hamilton, vice-president of promotions and publicity for Global, concedes the network always takes viewer heat for the arrangement.
“People complain all the time about not seeing these ads,” he says. “We don’t apologize because we do have the Canadian rights for the game, and it would be great if the Canadian chapters of these companies who are producing them could buy the time and air the creative here, but in most cases that’s not the case.”
Hamilton laughs at the odd prospect of viewer complaints over the issue.
“It’s the only time of year where we actually get people calling to say I WANT to see commercials!”
Truly determined viewers who live near a U.S. border signal could foil the override, though, by disconnecting their cable or satellite service. In Toronto, for example, the ABC affiliate in Buffalo, N.Y. can be received with an old-fashioned antenna.
South of the border, of course, Super Bowl Sunday is more than a sporting event. It has become a national holiday viewed through the electronic stadium of television. And sponsors traditionally pull out all stops to debut imaginative, prestigious and very expensive ads for which they’re paying more than $2 million US for a mere 30 seconds of airtime.
That sounds expensive until you consider that an estimated 130 million people in the U.S. will be tuned in to the game and may catch most of the 61 half-minute ad slots. There’s also an acknowledged prestige factor. In today’s fragmented TV universe, the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards are among the few scheduled programs left that can promise and deliver a truly mass audience.
Global TV expects to lure some three million pairs of eyeballs to the game coverage. Hamilton says Global has sold all its ad time, but won’t say how much it’s charging. He stresses that the old 10-to-one economic ratio doesn’t apply, though. In other words, a spot going for $2 million on ABC would not go for $200,000 in this country.
“Something less than $100,000,” is all he would say.
Hamilton says at least one of the U.S. sponsors, Pepsi, may also run its new ad on Global’s game telecast, but that would be an exception. Generally, Canadian ads will be seen only in Canada and U.S. ads in the U.S.
One Toronto agency, Downtown Partners DDB, has produced a couple of the American spots, including one for Bud Light beer. The Anheuser-Busch brewery has the most Super Bowl ads — 10 of the 30-second slots — including the most coveted and costliest — the first ad after the kickoff. Anheuser-Busch is also the game’s exclusive beer advertiser for the 15th year in a row.
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