Recession raises stakes for Super Bowl advertising

By Paul Thomasch and Ben Klayman

NEW YORK/CHICAGO (Reuters) - The Super Bowl is always high pressure for advertisers -- but this year expect more nail biting, pacing and hand wringing than ever before from chief marketing officers.

They have good reason to be anxious. A recession that has companies closely watching expenses -- and cutting everything from staffing to travel costs -- makes the $3 million price tag for 30 seconds of commercial time during NBC's broadcast of the National Football League's championship game on February 1 even more conspicuous than usual.

"The Super Bowl remains this incredibly unique advertising opportunity because you get all this focus and all this attention and all the PR buzz around it," says Tim Calkins, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University.

"That's huge and that's still the case. The hard part now is it's a tough year to justify the spending and it is a tough year to hit the right tonality on the game," he added.

Commercial prices for the Super Bowl are always eye-popping, far above what is paid for any other TV event, partly because it draws more than 95 million U.S. viewers. Ads during the Academy Awards, another major advertising event which pulled about 32 million U.S. viewers last year, run about $1.8 million for a 30-second spot.

Still, NBC sold most of its advertising time for the Super Bowl by the end of the summer at prices around the $3 million mark. At the moment, it has about 10 percent of its commercial time left to sell.

Seth Winter, senior vice president of NBC Sports Sales & Marketing, said that the broadcaster has not "compromised" its rates to draw in last-minute advertisers.

Sources nonetheless say that NBC, which is majority-owned by General Electric Co (GE.N), has shown more willingness in recent weeks to reconsider its stance on pricing to draw interest from advertisers.