Bob Dole and the elephant are gone, but the lizards, Jerry Seinfeld, and the thirsty frogs will all be back.
Super Bowl XXXIII is two days away, but the advertising hoopla has been building for weeks. American Express Co. has been running teaser commercials for its latest Seinfeld spot. Budweiser fans can get a glimpse of yet another Bud Bowl on the Internet.
Credit card companies are doing their part to keep hype levels high for the championship confrontation between the Denver Broncos and Atlanta Falcons in Miami.
As was the case last year, Visa U.S.A., MasterCard International, and American Express Co. all have bought air time. And Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co.'s Discover unit again will sit on the sidelines. (Hartford Financial Services is also getting in on the act. See page 8.)
The price of a 30-second spot has risen to a record $1.6 million, up from $1.3 million last year.
Visa and American Express each bought a minute during the game. Visa will run two check card commercials in the first half, and American Express will use a full 60 seconds for the Seinfeld debut, scheduled to air in the third quarter. MasterCard bought 30 seconds during the first half for a new commercial on the "Priceless Moments" theme.
Industry experts say the stakes are always high for Super Bowl advertisers.
"If you have a bad commercial, it could strategically counteract your whole communication program," said George Rosenbaum, chief executive officer of Leo J. Shapiro & Associates, a market research firm in Chicago.
A miscue "can be very serious. You have a huge audience, and it's an acid test of who you are and what you're telling people," he said.
Super Bowl advertisers are paying for the opportunity to reach 130 million viewers nationally and 800 million worldwide. It has become a showcase for new commercials.
The latest issue of TV Guide has two articles devoted to Super Bowl advertising, with a schedule of when key ads will appear.
"It's a spotlight, and you pay extra to get under it," said Steven J. Smith, president of S.J. Smith & Associates in Scarsdale, N.Y. The "real test," he said, is whether the card companies' Super Bowl efforts have "legs-whether they can use it all year and leverage it."
All three credit card majors are sticking with established campaigns.
Though Mr. Seinfeld has stopped doing his sitcom, his face is as fresh as the National Football League playoff games of Jan. 17, when American Express began running the teasers. The 15-second spots, made by Ogilvy & Mather of New York, portray Mr. Seinfeld in four different situations on the set of his former program-but do not explain what he is doing.
In one ad he is shown packing the "puffy shirt" he used to joke about into a suitcase. Another shows him going through a bunch of Pez candy dispensers-another running gag - and deciding which ones to keep.
There is no sound. The words "Do more-American Express" appear on the screen at the end.
American Express said its one-minute Super Bowl spot will make sense of the riddle. The message will be "that American Express can help you do more no matter what you're doing," said John Hayes, executive vice president of global advertising at Ogilvy & Mather.
Visa will air new versions of the debit card campaign it started during Super Bowl XXXI with defeated presidential candidate Bob Dole.
Last year, Visa promoted platinum cards at the Super Bowl. The ad, which featured an elephant, did not leave the lasting impression of the celebrity-studded debit ads and did not endure.
This year, Visa will return to the more successful check card formula with spots titled "Nigel" and "Romance." Visa would not go into detail, but said the spots are humorous and meant to depict everyday situations in which the check card is the most convenient payment method. Visa's agency of record is BBDO New York.
"The Super Bowl is the event of the year and the premier creative platform, so we have a rule-show your best work," said Liz Silver, Visa's senior vice president of advertising.
Advertisements for the check card are "going through a sort of evolution, from a more educational phase to a more usage-driven phase," Ms. Silver said. "We thought the Super Bowl was a great place to show this."
Visa has been the official card sponsor of the NFL for four years, so its brand is presumably well-known to football fans. Visa's NFL theme advertising featuring San Francisco 49ers teammates Steve Young and Jerry Rice was selected as the "best football theme ad of 1998" by the NFL Quarterback Club, a group of top players who have formed a marketing group.
MasterCard-which began advertising during the Super Bowl only last year- will debut the 18th "Priceless Moments" spot, developed by McCann-Erickson.
Lawrence P. Flanagan, vice president of advertising for MasterCard, would not reveal details, but said the ad is aimed at a "general audience- it has nothing to do with football."
A year ago, MasterCard was four months into its "Priceless" campaign. It aired "Zipper," in which a young man tries to pick up a woman in a cafe and trips over a coffee table, and "India," about a couple going to India for their wedding anniversary. About 100 million people saw those ads, Mr. Flanagan said.
Visa's Ms. Silver said MasterCard's new campaign "just made the category that much hotter. ...This is just turning up the dial one more notch." She said Visa wants to use its ads "to hold share of voice."
Mr. Smith, the consultant, said MasterCard's decision to begin buying Super Bowl time indicates how "everyone is working harder."
Brian McCarthy, a spokesman for the NFL, said the Super Bowl is consistently the top-rated TV show of the year. Though the advertisers tend to target men age 18 to 29, Mr. McCarthy said more than 50 million women watch the game.
Mr. McCarthy said the Super Bowl has proven itself as a "stage for advertisers to reach millions and millions of a captive audience."
