As temperatures in Atlanta plummeted over the last couple of days, and with up to four inches of snow expected today, the most vibrant sign of life in Super Bowl city has been the ABC network stand in the media room. As everyone else shivers, the ABC folk whistle as they work.
The network stands to raise $130 million from advertising revenue during Sunday's game, a harvest which will bring blushes to the faces of Rupert Murdoch's Fox executives who broadcast the event last year. ABC's take is a 38 per cent increase on the Fox haul.
The event is expected to draw up to 130 million viewers, yet ABC's advertising windfall comes just 12 months after Fox received one of the lowest viewing numbers in years for a Super Bowl. This year's competing sides, the St Louis Rams and the Tennessee Titans, both come from relatively small markets.
ABC have cashed in on the dot.com craze, however, allowing the Web folk to push the price of a 30-second Super Bowl advertising slot up from $2.2 million last year to $3 million this year. Fifteen of the 33 advertisers during Sunday's game will be directly selling Web-related product.
The price being paid by the new media gurus has scared off many traditional Super Bowl advertisers, such as Nike, Nissan and McDonalds.
What's more, ABC have played hardball with the technofolk by making many e-commerce companies cough up in advance for the advertising slots.
ABC's director of NFL sales, Larry Fried, was quoted this week on the break with traditional practices. "For new companies we have asked for the money up front." That goes for any advertiser "who doesn't have particularly good credit or has no payment history".
The craze for Super Bowl advertising slots has been driven partly by the immense success of two ads which debuted at last year's Super Bowl on behalf of Hotjobs.com and their rivals Monster.com.
Both companies are online jobs agencies, and Hotjobs.com created a huge media splash last year when it gambled its entire future on a $2 million ad slot. The company at the time had total revenues of $4 million, but it hit the publicity jackpot both with its bold gamble and Fox's decision to make it reshoot its original ad in a more tasteful format.
Monster.com purchased two advertising slots in the wake of the Hotjobs.com publicity coup and got even better value for their money. The Monster ad, which featured kids talking deadpan about their future - "I want to be a brownnose. I want to be a yesman." - was picked by Time magazine as among the best television moments of 1999.
Needless to say, both agencies are back with new ads this year. Hotjobs.com have two minutes worth of advertising, while Monster.com hope to make a big impact with one 30-second ad screened in the fourth quarter of Sunday's game.
This year's coup from the dot.com world was staged by Angeltips.com, a company which brings together entrepreneurs and investors. Angeltips.com turned their advertisement into a will they/won't they saga. The company originally opted to spend 25 per cent of its advertising budget on one 30-second ad. It was asked to pay in advance. It made a commitment to take further ads on ABC during the year and the pay-in-advance demand was dropped.
Angletips then decided in late December to drop out of the Super Bowl slot altogether and spend the money with ABC during the year. All this was reported widely and breathlessly.
The biggest new entrant from the e-commerce world is ETrade, an online stock trading firm which is gambling heavily by showing two 30-second ads in the first quarter, two more in the third quarter and sponsoring the half-time show.
The biggest media splash is being made by Anheuser-Busch, who for the 12th year running have paid to be the exclusive beer advertisers during the Super Bowl. The company are spending $30 million on 10 ads for their Budweiser and Bud Light products.
As ABC's biggest and best established customers, AnheuserBusch will pay only $17 million for the slots. The remaining $13 million will go on creating the ads. The brewer has had 400 people working on winnowing down 70 concepts over the past six months.
Anheuser-Busch hope to use the slot to begin to phase out their long-running talking lizards. The move is part of a plan to reposition the beer into a more upmarket slot.
All companies will hope to avoid the fate of Holiday Inn, who debuted a slot a few years ago (it featured a guy having a sex change) which received such negative reaction that all further showings were snipped within 48 hours. The company haven't been back.
