Forget the Green Bay Packers and the New England Patriots. The real battle that will take place Sunday during the Super Bowl in New Orleans will be waged after the cameras break away from the field and go to the commercials.
More than 25 companies are paying Fox Broadcasting Co. an average of $1.2 million for each half-minute ad that will air during Super Bowl XXXI, and for what is believed to be the first time ever, a Utah advertising agency has produced a series of ads that will appear during the game.Executives of Dahlin, Smith White were in New York City Wednesday to unveil a super campaign for its client, computer chipmaker Intel, that will air during the game Sunday.
"As far as we know, this will be the first-ever Utah-produced spots to be aired on the Super Bowl," said Jon White, a partner in the Salt Lake firm.
DSW, Intel's ad agency of record for the past seven years, has created a series of ads for Intel to promote its new Multimedia Exten-sion (MMX) chips and its Video-phone, which uses regular tele-phone lines to do video tele-con-ferencing.
Both products have been on the market for about two weeks, but most people will hear about them for the first time during the big game, said White.
"It represents an elevation of what we've been doing," said White in a phone interview. "We are using humor and a big star, Jason Alexander (best known as "George" in the comedy show "Seinfeld). They represent a new level of ads for Intel," based in San Jose, Calif.
Up to this point, he said, Intel's ads took consumers inside the computer, where the company's products reside, in an attempt to "demystify" the devices. Now, via the TV commercials, consumers will be taken inside Intel's manufacturing plants for a further look at the company whose chips dominate the computer market.
DSW's three Intel ads will air in 30-second segments during the pregame show, just before kickoff, during the game and in the post-game show, for a total cost of about $3.5 million.
But the Super Bowl won't be the last of DSW's Intel ads. "You'll be seeing them a lot on network television over the next two to three months and there are new spots under development right now," said White.
The MMX technology, an advanced version of Intel's Pentium Pro microprocessor, is said to beef up the performance of Pentium-equipped computers. With an MMX Pentium computer users are said to see smoother video, richer graphics and the stereo sound is said to be more lifelike. Also, some graphics will appear in 3-D.
MMX is also the key to Intel's new Videophone. White said the quality of the video picture varies according to the computers used by those participating in the conference. "At the highest level, it's very smooth video," he said.