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On the matter of Super Bowl ad clutter. And, yes, it does matter, hurting recall with viewers

By Diego Vasquez

Clutter is a headache for media people under any circumstances, making it harder for an advertiser’s message to stand out. And when you’re paying a record $2.6 million to deliver that message, as are those advertisers with spots in this year’s Super Bowl on CBS, it’s even more of a concern. According to a report released late last week by TNS Media Intelligence, the Super Bowl has become more cluttered than ever. Last year’s game on ABC contained a record 47.2 minutes of ads, nearly four more minutes than Fox had the previous year. That includes promotions for the Super Bowl carrier’s own shows, a category that has exploded over the past five years. In 2001, the Super Bowl carrier ran 5 minutes and 55 seconds of self-promotion. Last year that soared to 10 minutes and 25 seconds. TNS also found that over the past 20 years, the Super Bowl has run more than 11 full hours of commercials for 221 advertisers, representing an investment of $1.72 billion. But such clutter may be less of a worry to veteran advertisers who have gotten used to the Super Bowl environment. TNS projects nearly two-thirds of this year’s Super Bowl ad spending will be by advertisers who also participated in last year’s big game. Jon Swallen, senior vice president of research at TNS Media Intelligence, talks with Media Life about Super Bowl clutter, how the game stacks up against other sporting events, and the hot ad category the past few years.
 

You found that last year’s Super Bowl had a record amount of clutter. How much of a concern is this for media people?
 
I think clutter’s a concern for all advertisers because it does impact consumer’s recall. Arguably it’s probably less of a concern for Super Bowl than for normal programming, but still, all those commercials competing and advertisers paying what they’re paying–it still remains an issue when they have to justify what they’re paying.

 
How cluttered do you think the game will get before we finally start to see it sink or plateau?
 
I don’t know. I was surprised when I saw the statistics from last year, because it had stabilized before for a couple years at around 41 or 42 minutes, and last year it jumped to over 47 minutes.

Part of the issue here is the rights the networks pay to broadcast the games. To recoup those fees the network has to be able to sell ads and generate revenue. So I think what puts pressure on the clutter level is the rights fees and the networks’ desire to turn a profit on the event. I think as rights fees rise, we’ll continue to see clutter on the rise as well.
 

How valuable is the promotional platform that the Super Bowl carrier receives to advertise its own shows?
 
I think it’s extremely valuable. The commercials you run on your own airtime is the primary mechanism to promote your own programming, and it’s a large captive audience, so it’s a great way to promote your own shows. It won’t guarantee people will watch them, but they’ll be aware of them.

There’s also kind of new a tradition now of a network running one of its programs in the slot immediately after the Super Bowl, using it as a terrific lead-in. The choice the network makes is another promotional benefit the Super Bowl represents for them.
 

Have you noticed any trends in advertising spending over the past few years for the Super Bowl? Why are they important?
 
The rates continue to creep upwards, and clutter does too, and those two together keep pushing revenue higher and higher each year.

One of the things that’s changed over the last decade is the composition of advertisers.

Beer and car companies are always there, but what other categories fill out the Super Bowl? That’s where you see some of the trends in the industry. In ‘99 and 2000, there was huge volume of dot.com ads. There’s still those now, but not nearly the level it was at six or seven years ago.

In the past several years one of the strong categories has been movies. For the movie category the Super Bowl is a great opportunity because of the huge audience, so it’s the fringes that kind of reflect the trends in advertising.
 

In-game ads receive most of the attention, but there’s a lot spent on network pre and post-game ads as well. What is the value of spending on these programs for advertisers? Are there reasons advertisers prefer these spots to in-game ads other than the obvious pricing considerations?
 
I think a good chunk of it is you have to look at the target audience, who’s watching. The game itself attracts a significant female audience, but the pregame stuff is skewed more toward males, the regular-season football demographic. If you’re an advertiser trying to reach upscale males, the pregame shows are a good venue.

But how much does it cost? Less than the game because audience is smaller. But because the pregame telecasts consume a lot of airtime, it creates sponsorship opportunities for advertisers who don’t want to pay the rates of Super Bowl but still want to target that demographic.

So I think the pregame show in particular can be used very strategically as an alternate to in-game spots.
 

You find that retention rate of incumbent advertiser money is 62 percent, which is actually lower than the Academy Awards and World Series. Why is that and what does it mean?
 
I think it’s first the unit rate. Paying upwards of $2 million for a 30-second spot is a pricey proposition and one that’s always under scrutiny. So that works against a retention rate. By comparison, a spot in the World Series, while pricey, doesn’t come any where close to the Super Bowl.

The second thing is, particularly with Academy Awards, it has been called the Super Bowl for women, it’s the single largest female audience outside of Super Bowl itself.

By contrast, on the sports audience side if Super Bowl is too pricey, there are more alternatives, so I think that makes the Academy Awards sponsors more eager to renew their commitment as opposed to the male-targeted advertisers.
 

The TNS report also examines ad revenue for the World Series and Final Four events, and it finds that Final Four revenue has grown the most over the past five years. Why is that?
 
I think the Final Four has become–the whole March Madness, the whole tournament–arguably the second or third marquee sporting event of the year. The Super Bowl is No. 1, and then you can make a choice of the World Series or the college basketball tournament for No. 2 and No. 3.

I think the timing. The end of the first quarter, beginning of the second works well for basketball. There’re not a lot of other events, so the timing is in its favor. And fan and viewer interest in the event has grown enormously over the past decade. So that helps prop up the viewership level and lets the network increase the rates. The Final Four is the culmination of a two- or three-week event, whereas the Super Bowl is just a one-day event, so it builds to a conclusion.

 
Diego Vasquez is a staff writer for Media Life.
via medialifemagazine.com

By William Spain, MarketWatch

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) — Commercial advertising time in the Super Bowl has steadily gotten more expensive, generating well over $1 billion in sales for the broadcast networks over the last two decades, according to data released on Wednesday.

In the 20 Super Bowls played since 1986, the networks have carried 717 minutes, or roughly 12 hours, of advertising during game broadcasts a combined value of almost $1.6 billion, said TNS Media Intelligence, an ad-tracking firm.

There have been more than 1,400 ads from 227 different marketers over that time period, and the top five spenders accounted for roughly one-third of the total.

TNS said the No. 1 spender was Anheuser-Busch (NYSE:BUD) , which has ponied up a total of $230 million and has been a sponsor in every Super Bowl broadcast covered by the study.

After that comes PepsiCo (NYSE:PEP) at $180 million. Rounding out the top five sponsors were General Motors (OTHER:MTLQQ) , Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) and Fedex (NYSE:FDX) .

Many of the top advertisers come back year after year, noted Jon Swallen, research director at TNS.

“I was surprised at the continuity,” he said. “You know there will be Budweiser and Pepsi, but I would have been hard-pressed to say that about General Motors and Fedex.”

The top five advertisers have all been in the game for at least 10 years, he said, with about 60% of the ad money invested in the game coming from marketers that ran commercials the previous year.

While that’s “a very high retention rate, it’s actually lower than the comparable rate for two other showcase TV events,” he added, referring to the Academy Awards at 78% and the World Series at 67%.

Since 1986, the cost of a 30-second spot has more than quadrupled, hitting $2.5 million in 2005 on last year’s Fox broadcast. The amount of time given over to sponsors has jumped from 36 minutes to 43 minutes, including promotional “house” ads, which make up about 25% of total time.

And the Super Bowl grinds all comers into the dust when it comes to revenues. In 2001, the championship game brought in $136.4 million in ads, about the same as all seven games of the World Series and way ahead of the $88.7 million garnered during the NCAA’s Final Four.

Last year, the Super Bowl generated $159 million in sales, eclipsing the $148 million from four World Series games and the Final Four’s $142 million.

via marketwatch.com

http://www.adweek.com/aw/regional/west/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000789762

By Gregory Solman

LOS ANGELES A study of Super Bowl advertising effectiveness shows that movies marketed during the big game perform 40 percent better at the box office than films that are not.

The report by Rama Yelkur, Chuck Tomkovick and Patty Traczyk, of the marketing department of the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, was first published in the Journal of Advertising Research. It covered 21 movies advertising on the Super Bowl telecast from 1998 to 2001, though the professors said the model has been shown to apply to 2002 to 2004. In 2003, for example, all 10 movies advertised on the game opened at No. 1 at the box office.

“We studied the movies because the data is pure and available,” said Tomkovick. “In a sense, it is always a new product,” with no prior box-office accumulation. The research discovered that movie marketers who advertise on the Super Bowl earn better opening weekend revenue, first week business and bigger total U.S. receipts.

To purify their model, the authors dismissed artsy, small- and mid-budget releases that would be unlikely candidates to advertise at Super Bowl rates of millions of dollars per 30-second spot. “We looked at male-oriented, youth-oriented action or comedy movies in pre-packaged forms,” said Yelkur. “The movies compared had to have made the top 10 for at least one week. And we looked only at February to August releases.”

Tomkovick added that the study took into account the placement of the movie within the game, and factored “a smattering of [overall] marketing investment as a criteria” to even the playing field. “The score of the game doesn’t turn off the Super Bowl advertising viewers,” he said, adding that 8 percent of all viewers watch the game solely for the new commercials. “In fact, we’re found that the less scintillating the game, the more attention is paid to the commercials. That’s how it’s gone from being the Super Bowl to the Bud Bowl to the Ad Bowl.”

http://www.sportsbusinessnews.com/index.asp?story_id=43884

Spending millions to advertise in the Feb. 6 Super Bowl will likely pay off for Hollywood’s movie studios, say marketing experts at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, who have studied Super Bowl advertising for five years.

Advertisements during the high-profile game are selling for an average of $2.4 million per 30-second spot, a record amount for the National Football League’s championship game.

The movie industry is among those most likely to benefit from advertising in the game, said Charles Tomkovick, UW-Eau Claire professor of management and marketing, who with Rama Yelkur, associate professor of management and marketing, completed the first known Super Bowl advertising effectiveness study of its kind.

“All else being equal, spending $2 million-plus for a movie ad in the Super Bowl will pay off handsomely for most studios,” Tomkovick said.

Research results, which were published in the Journal of Advertising Research, found that the average Super Bowl promoted film achieved twice as much first weekend, first week and total U.S. box office revenue than non- Super Bowl promoted movies. Even when researchers applied more rigorous tests, controlling for release dates and budget size, they found similar results.

Hollywood began running a couple of Super Bowl ads in the early 1990s. Then in 1996, Fox spent $1.1 million to promote “Independence Day,” which achieved U.S. revenues of $300 million and $500 million worldwide.

“This was the turning point,” Yelkur said. “Movie advertisers en masse realized the benefits of Super Bowl advertising.” Eight movies were advertised in 2002 and 10 in 2003.

Researchers examined box office gross revenues for movies advertised during the 1998-2001 Super Bowls. They compared it with data from a random sample of movies that weren’t advertised during the game over the same time. They compared first weekend, first week and total U.S. box office revenues. They controlled for movie release dates and refined their analysis to include only high budget films.

Opening weekend revenues for Super Bowl promoted movies in 2002 and 2003 were phenomenal, Tomkovick said. Fifteen of the 18 earned the top U.S. Box Office position for their opening weekend. Two came in second and the weakest of the 18 premiered at No. 4.

Source:University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6882052/

At $4.8 million a minute, obscure advertisers hope to score big

By Martin Wolk MSNBC

Tune in to the Super Bowl Sunday and you can be certain of seeing the usual quota of slick and humorous ads from mainstays of the game including Budweiser, Pepsi-Cola, Subway and Frito-Lay.

But you might be surprised by little-known newcomers who hope to make a big first impression, including makers of snack nuts, contact lenses and kitchen countertops.

Countertops at the Super Bowl? It’s a natural fit, said Gina Covell, a spokeswoman for Houston-based Cosentino USA, a distributor of quartz countertops that ranks among this year’s crop of lesser-known Super Bowl sponsors.

“Home remodeling has been the rage for the past few years, and kitchens are probably the No. 1 room that is remodeled in the house,” said Covell. “What bigger way to break out than in the Super Bowl?”

With about $1 billion in revenue last year, Cosentino is no startup, but the Super Bowl plunge still represents a big risk. The company, which has never produced a television ad before, is paying top dollar for its debut: $2.4 million for 30 seconds of air time, plus $1 million in production costs for a spot featuring sports celebrities Dennis Rodman and Mike Ditka. The one-day spending spree is more than double last year’s entire advertising budget, which mainly was spent on print spots in publications like Better Homes and Gardens, Covell said.

Cosentino might strike paydirt with its humorous ad, which portrays macho athletes arguing over who is “Diana Pearl,” one of the company’s whimsically named countertop colors. But inexperienced advertisers need to make the Super Bowl part of a complete marketing campaign or risk fading quickly into obscurity as so many one-timers have done, experts say.

Just think back to the “dot-com bowl” of 2000, which featured 17 dot-com advertisers, many of them obscure names that quickly disappeared from view, like OurBeginning.com, LifeMinders.com and Epidemic.com.

“You really need to have a strong company, have a strong product and be a really good marketer before you consider the Super Bowl,” said Chuck Tomkovick, a professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire.

What were they thinking? Stories are legion of one-time wonders who botched their only Super Bowl appearance and never returned. One memorable failure was a 1999 Just For Feet spot that was so bad that the now-defunct shoe store chain actually sued its ad agency. The ad depicted a squad of white militiamen tracking down a barefoot black African runner, knocking him out with a drug-laced beverage and forcing him into Nikes.

Even well-established companies have fumbled their only Super Bowl appearance. A series of 2001 spots from Accenture, a business consulting company, was widely panned as incomprehensible.

“It was absolutely horrible,” said John Antil, a business professor at the University of Delaware who studies Super Bowl advertising.

Of course some companies have hidden motives for wanting to be part of the advertising industry’s biggest event of the year, even if they don’t fit the typical Super Bowl mold of food, drink and entertainment.

In Accenture’s case, Antil said, the company formerly known as Andersen Consulting was desperate to gets its new name in front of a large audience that included CEOs and other high-ranking executives.

Advertisers frequently have a secondary target beyond the estimated 130 million U.S. consumers who tune in for at least part of the game.

For example MasterLock, which famously has blown much of its annual advertising budget on past Super Bowl commercials, uses the big game appearance as leverage to entertain buyers and distributors who are crucial to its fortunes. Similarly, car company commercials in the Super Bowl are rarely memorable but may go a long way toward boosting manufacturer relations with key dealers.

130 million armchair reviewers Super Bowl commercials offer some unique fringe benefit, including a few tickets to the game that advertisers can use to entertain clients or partners. A Super Bowl also stokes employee morale, and advertisers generate an unusual amount of free media attention, like this article.

But by far the biggest attraction for advertisers is that Super Bowl Sunday is just about the only day of the year when the advertising commands as much attention as the programming. At a typical Super Bowl party, everyone becomes an armchair ad reviewer, and a substantial minority say the ads are the main reason they tune in.

“There are very few venues where the advertisements are as much of an ingrained experience as the content of the event itself,” said Richard Castellini, vice president, consumer marketing at CareerBuilder.com, a job postings Web site that is rolling out a major national ad push with two Super Bowl spots.

Castellini took great pains to distance his company from the dot-com failures of a few years back, as did Bob Parsons, founder and president of GoDaddy.com, which will kick off a $19 million national marketing campaign in the first quarter of Sunday’s game.

“It’s not a gamble,” said Parsons, who is the sole stockholder in GoDaddy, an Internet domain registrar.

“We have been the leader in our market for three years,” he said. “If this year’s marketing budget does not produce one dollar in additional sales, we’ll still throw off $14 million in cash. I’ll still be supersizing it at McDonald’s.”

Ingredients for success Conventional wisdom – and some market research – holds that Super Bowl advertisers need humor, animals, celebrities or some combination to be well-liked and effective. Categories that fit in well with the day’s partying mood do well, experts say. Sober subjects like financial services and pharmaceuticals typically get the thumbs-down.

So CIBA Vision will be bucking the odds when it makes its Super Bowl debut — an atmospheric spot promoting the benefits of its new O2 contact lenses.

Karen Gough, CIBA Vision’s president for the Americas, makes no apologies for the straightforward approach. The ad is chiefly targeted at women, who constitute about half the Super Bowl audience but two-thirds of contact lens wearers, she said.

“I think it’s important to note that we didn’t develop the campaign with the Super Bowl in mind,” Gough said. “We developed the campaign to communicate to our core audience. We just picked the Super Bowl as a way to get that campaign across to a broad range of viewers.”

While the Super Bowl is a great place to reach a lot of eyeballs, including those that need corrective lenses, it only works in the context of an integrated marketing campaign, she and others agreed.

“If you’re going to spend the money, you need to leverage it beyond the 30 seconds,” said Sandy McBride, marketing vice president of Emerald Nuts, another first-timer.

The snack-nut maker, a new brand developed by a 93-year-old walnut farmers’ cooperative, will promote its Super Bowl spot with a full-page newspaper ad before the game. And viewers will be encouraged to log on to a clever Web site after the game to continue the story begun in its commercial, which features Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and a unicorn.

With humor, mythical animals, a mythical celebrity and snack food, the ad has all the ingredients of a potential Super Bowl classic.

GoDaddy.com, on the other hand, is courting controversy with an ad that appears to portray an attractive young woman losing her blouse at a hearing on broadcast censorship. Parsons, the GoDaddy founder, promised that the spot would be “in extremely good taste.”

“It’s fun and it’s not tawdry,” he said.

And how will we know whether the ad succeeded?

“Watch the 2006 Super Bowl,” he said. “If I’m back in it, it worked.”

http://www.nwherald.com/StyleSection/313174661107154.php

NORTHWEST HERALD

EAU CLAIRE, Wis. – Spending millions to advertise in the Feb. 6 Super Bowl will likely pay off for Hollywood’s movie studios, say marketing experts at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, who have studied Super Bowl advertising for five years.

Advertisements during the high-profile game are selling for an average of $2.4 million per 30-second spot, a record amount for the National Football League’s championship game.

The movie industry is among those most likely to benefit from advertising in the game, said Charles Tomkovick, UW-Eau Claire professor of management and marketing, who with Rama Yelkur, associate professor of management and marketing, completed the first known Super Bowl advertising effectiveness study of its kind.

“All else being equal, spending $2 million-plus for a movie ad in the Super Bowl will pay off handsomely for most studios,” Tomkovick said.

Research results, which were published in the Journal of Advertising Research, found that the average Super Bowl promoted film achieved twice as much first weekend, first week and total U.S. box office revenue than non-Super Bowl promoted movies. Even when researchers applied more rigorous tests, controlling for release dates and budget size, they found similar results.

Hollywood began running a couple of Super Bowl ads in the early 1990s. Then in 1996, Fox spent $1.1 million to promote “Independence Day,” which achieved U.S. revenues of $300 million and $500 million worldwide.

“This was the turning point,” Yelkur said. “Movie advertisers en masse realized the benefits of Super Bowl advertising.” Eight movies were advertised in 2002 and 10 in 2003.

Researchers examined box office gross revenues for movies advertised during the 1998-2001 Super Bowls. They compared it with data from a random sample of movies that weren’t advertised during the game over the same time. They compared first weekend, first week and total U.S. box office revenues. They controlled for movie release dates and refined their analysis to include only high budget films.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=7414083

By Michele Gershberg

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Call it the ripple effect, or the nipple effect, but Super Bowl advertisers have eased off the hoopla ahead of the National Football League championship game this year following an indecency scandal last year.

Less than two weeks before the big U.S. game on Feb. 6, few advertisers have trumpeted their plans for U.S. television’s most watched commercial venue — and, at $2.4 million per 30-second spot, the most expensive.

Many were sobered by a viewer outcry after the 2004 Super Bowl, when singer Janet Jackson bared a breast while performing in the halftime show. The incident prompted an indecency crackdown by federal regulators.

“There may be some caution in the air now based on what happened at halftime last year,” Bob Scarpelli, U.S. chief creative officer at the DDB ad agency, told Reuters. “Marketers are being cautious in terms of what they’re going to run and also how it is talked about in the press.”

The backlash engulfed the more off-color commercials during last year’s game, including a flatulent horse in an ad for brewer Anheuser-Busch and a breezy peek up a bagpipe player’s kilt for Sierra Mist soda.

As a result, some advertisers may actually prefer to wait this time and let the commercials do the talking.

“Larger advertisers have been burned in the past by over-hyping what turned out to be rather bad or at least unpopular ads,” said brand expert Mark DiMassimo.

Marketing executives say they are aiming for smiles, not outrage. Several childhood icons will even tout products this year, including Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny in ads for Emerald of California snack nuts.

Novartis AG’s CIBA Vision will debut a Super Bowl spot aimed at women consumers for its newest contact lens. The ad has lens-wearers exchanging flirtatious, but not racy, glances.

“It is very appealing to both men and women, delivered tastefully — and I will underscore that,” said Karen Gough, CIBA Vision’s president of the Americas. “I think it’s safe to say the Super Bowl this year will be a much more appropriate venue for advertisers.”

Marketers may have also hesitated to talk up ads in the weeks after a Dec. 26 tsunami in south Asia that killed more than 200,000 people, eliciting a global outpouring of sympathy and pledges of aid. Advertisers responded with similar caution after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. Continued …

In addition, notably absent this year are marketing battles played up by the media in the weeks before the 2004 Super Bowl. These included the launch of rival erectile dysfunction drugs to Pfizer’s Viagra, an internal ad contest at Procter & Gamble and a campaign against illegal music downloading.

DDB AGENCY TOPS WITH SPOTS

But Scarpelli and other ad executives say the appetite for entertainment and surprise remains strong. Super Bowl hype could yet build in the final stretch before the game.

“There’s going to be more of a carefulness not to be insensitive, but I think people really need entertainment and laughter during very tough times,” said David Lubars, chief creative officer at BBDO North America. The agency is preparing in-game spots for clients like Visa and FedEx Corp .

“I think it will be funny,” he said. “Last year there was an unintentional trend. But that doesn’t mean they (advertisers) aren’t going to try and do something provocative or stand out, because it is the biggest stage.”

Omnicom Group’s DDB is working on as many as 10 commercials aimed at the Super Bowl, to be broadcast from Jacksonville, Florida, by the Fox television network.

That would make DDB — bolstered by perennial Super Bowl marketers like Anheuser-Busch and new forays by McDonald’s, AmeriQuest and Tabasco — the agency with the largest number of Super Bowl spots, a place often claimed by sister agency BBDO.

One Super Bowl preview comes from General Motors Corp.’s Cadillac division, which already launched 5-second commercial teasers ahead of the big game. The ads playfully feature the accelerating power of its V-Series cars, which can speed from zero to 60 miles per hour in under five seconds.

“There’s a little bit of a smile in them, what we call our intelligent wit,” said Cadillac marketing director Jay Spenchian.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20040211-1546-indecentprogramming.html

By Jonathan D. Salant

ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON – Janet Jackson’s exposed breast was talk of Capitol Hill on Wednesday, with lawmakers and regulators saying it’s the latest example of all that’s wrong with TV and should serve as the impetus for government to get tough with broadcasters.

At a pair of hearings, lawmakers excoriated Mel Karmazin, president of Viacom Inc. His company owns CBS, which broadcast the raunchy Super Bowl halftime show that included Jackson.

Members of the House Telecommunications Committee spent more than two hours grilling Karmazin, who again apologized for the show that ended with singer Justin Timberlake tearing off part of Jackson’s top and exposing her right breast to 90 million TV viewers.

“You knew what you were doing,” said Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., her voice cracking. “You wanted us to be all abuzz. It lines your pockets.”

Karmazin insisted that CBS and MTV did not know about plans to rip off Jackson’s top, nor the crotch-grabbing dance steps that were also included in the halftime show. He said none of those actions took place during rehearsals.

“Everyone at Viacom and everyone at CBS and everyone at MTV was shocked and appalled and embarrassed at what had happened,” Karmazin said.

To prevent a repeat, he said CBS will air live programming on a five-minute delay, which was done for the Grammy awards this week. He said the network-owned stations would also buy equipment so that locally televised live programs would also be time-delayed. And he said the network was reviewing its standards for commercials in response to criticism over a movie trailer for a horror film and Super Bowl ads showing a flatulent horse and a crotch-biting dog.

The halftime show, produced by CBS’ corporate cousin MTV, drew more than 200,000 complaints to the Federal Communications Commission.

National Football League Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, also testifying before the House panel, said he expressed concerns about the halftime show in December and even considered dismissing MTV as producer. But he decided to move forward following a meeting with CBS President Les Moonves, and because of MTV’s track record in producing the 2001 halftime show.

“Clearly, there was a wide gap over what was appropriate,” Tagliabue said. “We should have recognized it earlier. We gave the keys to the car to someone else to drive without assuring they knew how to drive the car safely, and they crashed.”

All five FCC commissioners appeared before the two panels and urged Congress to give them a more powerful tool to use against broadcasters.

Legislation in both houses would increase the maximum fine for indecency from $27,500 to $275,000. The FCC already has said it will begin fining broadcasters for each incident rather than each program.

“Cost-of-doing-business fines will never stop Big Media’s slide to the bottom,” Commissioner Michael Copps said. “All of the fines we have imposed against Viacom could be paid for by adding one commercial to the Super Bowl, and the company would probably end up with a profit.”

Viacom is no stranger to the fight over indecency. Its Infinity Broadcasting subsidiary paid $1.7 million in 1995 to settle several cases against disc jockey Howard Stern, and the FCC last year proposed fining the company $357,000 for a radio segment on the “Opie and Anthony Show” in which a couple was said to be having sex in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Viacom is contesting the fine for its broadcast of the Opie and Anthony show. Karmazin said the show was tasteless and gross, but not indecent.

He called on the FCC to issue rules defining what is an indecent program.

“What’s happened is the standard has changed,” Karmazin said. “It is not exactly clear what is meant by indecency.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell said the commission has been able to enforce indecency standards for decades, and doesn’t need to go through a time-consuming process to write a rule.

“It’s a red herring,” Powell said. “There is no ambiguity with the indecency standard. It’s existed for 30 years.”

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040130/daf026_1.html

Press Release

Source: 7 UP

PLANO, Texas, Jan. 30 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — 7 UP has purchased one 30- second television commercial scheduled to air during the fourth quarter of the NFL’s Super Bowl XXXVIII on CBS Sunday. It is the second appearance for 7 UP in a Super Bowl game since 2000.

“This is a terrific opportunity for 7 UP to showcase our popular and very funny ‘Make 7 UP Yours’ advertising campaign,” stated Jim Trebilcock, 7 UP senior vice president-marketing. “The game draws a huge number of viewers, which makes it a great venue to reach millions of consumers with our refreshment beverage message presented in a humorous way.”

7 UP will air Slam Dunk, which leads into the brand’s sponsorship of college basketball and is one of the campaign’s new 2004 commercials featuring comedian Godfrey. The “Make 7 UP Yours” campaign first aired in late 1999 and featured actor/comedian Orlando Jones. After two years of successful commercials produced by Young & Rubicam New York, Jones moved on and was replaced by Godfrey, who continues to increase the popularity of the 7 UP campaign.

7 UP aired one 30-second commercial in the 2000 Super Bowl telecast, and had multiple commercials air in the 2001 pre-game telecast. “We are thrilled to be part of the Super Bowl XXXVIII telecast,” concluded Trebilcock.

7 UP is a leading brand in the soft drink portfolio of Plano, Texas-based Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Inc., which is owned by London-based Cadbury Schweppes plc (NYSE: CSG -News ). For more information about 7 UP, visit www.7up.com . For information about Dr Pepper/Seven Up, visit www.dpsu.com .