Sprint Hopes to Score Big in Super Bowl Telecast

By Jennifer Mann, The Kansas City Star, Mo.

Feb. 4–For the first time since 1992, what is now Sprint Nextel is suiting up for the Super Bowl, hoping to impress the audience of 130 million.

Not only is the No. 3 wireless company running two brand-new spots created specifically for the game Sunday, but as part of its multimillion-dollar, multiyear deal with the NFL, it is also the sponsor of the halftime show featuring the Rolling Stones.

With the merger of Sprint and Nextel still fresh, spokeswoman Angela Read said the company viewed the Super Bowl with its huge but diverse audience as the perfect place to make an impression about the offerings of the remade company.

“To us, it’s the perfect storm of awareness. It’s all about getting into the minds of consumers,” Read said.

Tim Calkins, professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, said the Super Bowl made perfect sense for a company like Sprint Nextel that, after a merger, was repositioning its brand.

“In a short period of time they can reach everybody, and they have something to say,” Calkins said. “I think the challenge is that the expectations for Super Bowl spots are very, very high, and you can easily get lost in the clutter.”

That clutter comes from about 40 spots that will span the game, traditionally the longest of the year.

Although some companies are trying to get more mileage out of the average $2.5 million they reportedly are paying for 30-second spots —- that’s $83,333 per second —- by previewing their ads on the Internet, Sprint has released only a tease of one of the two it will run.

One is titled “Couch” and shows a guy bragging to another that Sprint lets him download music whenever he wants and for any situation, including the tunes “Baby Come Back” if his girlfriend breaks up with him and “Cash in the Bank” if he wins the lottery.

When the braggart shows his friend his phone downloading his choice of songs, viewers see the new Sprint logo, which is a stylized version of its old, well-known pin drop. When his couch spontaneously bursts into fire, his friend asks what he has downloaded for that situation.

Sprint opted to not share with the media the last 15 seconds of that spot or any portion of the second one, preferring viewers to tune in Sunday and be surprised. One ad will run in the game’s second quarter, the other in the third. The second spot focuses on Sprint’s suite of wireless services, including streaming video, Sprint TV and all the on-demand services, which includes maps, weather forecasts and restaurant listings.

Read said Sprint initially looked at more than 25 concepts for its Super Bowl ads, narrowed them to about a dozen and produced four spots. Executives only recently decided which two would run in the game. All four eventually will go into its advertising rotation.

But the two ads are just a small piece of Sprint’s Super Bowl efforts. The wireless company is offering subscribers a range of Super Bowl-related stuff, including access to Super Bowl news conferences, screen shots of key players from the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Seattle Seahawks, Rolling Stones ringers and access to Rolling Stones music.

It is reported to be spending $12 million on the halftime show with the Rolling Stones, part of the company’s $600 million deal to sponsor the NFL for the next five years. The company has added hundreds of Stones songs to the Sprint Music Store, which allows subscribers to download music to their Sprint phones. In addition, Music Choice, which offers streaming music through Sprint phones, has set up a channel offering daily Stones interviews and music videos.

Other companies that geared up for the game are perennial advertisers such Anheuser-Busch Cos., which will run five minutes of spots, including its annual tearjerker one, this year featuring a Clydesdale colt that dreams of pulling the Budweiser wagon by itself.

Anheuser-Busch also will introduce a new product, Michelob Ultra Amber, in a humorous spot. In addition, it will, according to media reports, tout a soon-to-be unveiled direct-to-consumer Internet network, code-named Bud TV, that will allow users to download advertising, programming and entertainment directly onto their computers.

And as it has for several years, Anheuser-Busch has locked down the first ad to run after the kickoff, a highly coveted slot. The spot shows an up-and-coming employee hiding bottles of Bud Light to motivate his colleagues.

Also returning are Pepsi and FedEx. Calkins calls the two companies, along with Anheuser-Busch, the “masters, those that have something interesting to say and consistently have good creative.”

Also back in the game is MasterCard with a new spot featuring Richard Dean Anderson as his “MacGyver” character in which he uses an air freshener, a tube sock and a paper clip to escape some bad guys and try to disarm a bomb.

Burger King kicks off a new campaign featuring the creepy-to-some King, who goes “head to helmet” with NFL players, according to a blurb in Advertising Age

To celebrate its 40th Super Bowl, the NFL itself will show an ad featuring the two quarterbacks who faced off in the first Super Bowl, Len Dawson of the Chiefs and Bart Starr of the Green Bay Packers. Also showing up in the spot is Dick Vermeil, the Chiefs’ recently departed head coach who took the St. Louis Rams to a Super Bowl victory in 2000.

Perhaps the savviest Super Bowl advertiser the past two years is Internet domain seller www.Godaddy.com, which has crafted sexpot spots rejected repeatedly by the NFL and TV networks, including this year’s broadcaster, ABC. In the process, Godaddy has garnered tons of publicity.

However, Godaddy.com was happy to report late Thursday on its Web site that after 14 attempts it had crafted an ad acceptable to ABC’s tastemakers and, in fact, had purchased a second spot.

In the end, Calkins said, whether it’s Godaddy, Anheuser-Busch or Sprint, at the Kellogg School of Management there are four key points that advertisers must hit to have a winning game.

“It has to be breakthrough, it has to be well-branded, it has to show the benefits, and it has to likable,” Calkins said. “Those are the keys for Sprint and for everyone else.”

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To reach Jennifer Mann, call (816) 234-4453 or send e-mail to jmann@kcstar.com.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Kansas City Star, Mo.

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