LOS ANGELES — was almost unheard of six years ago. Then it ran the most talked-about ad of Super Bowl XXXIX — a spoof of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” in which a busty woman appears before a censorship board and a strap breaks on her skimpy top.
The spot was so racy that Fox yanked a second airing scheduled for later in the game. The other fallout? The Super Bowl ad rolled out each year by GoDaddy, which registers Internet domain names, is now almost as eagerly awaited as the halftime show.
Fox is charging about $3 million for 30 seconds of ad time this Sunday during Super Bowl XLV. So is the gamble worth it for companies?
“It’s not a bet,” GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons says, “if you know the outcome.”
Online businesses in particular reap big benefits from pitching during the big game. Viewers see the ads, then rush to the Web to see uncut versions of the commercial or snag freebies — and they end up becoming paying customers.
Take , which last year hired Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo to send up the old National Lampoon “Vacation” movies in a Super Bowl ad, in which a snooty concierge tells Chase he’s booked in the “Napoleon Suite,” which turns out to have a comically low ceiling.
It resulted in a huge increase in its vacation-rental bookings website.
The new business from the Super Bowl ad allowed the site to recoup 60 percent to 70 percent of the cost.
“The rest you’re attributing to future value,” co-founder and CEO Brian Sharples says.
The company is buying time during Sunday’s Packers-Steelers game and will save money on production by not using celebrities. It has already spent $1 million on servers to handle the Internet traffic bump last year and can reuse the equipment.
CareerBuilder’s ads helped the job-listing site leapfrog rival Monster after its first Super Bowl ad in 2005. The amount of money billed to companies posting new job listings in the month after the Super Bowl has risen, on average, by 39 percent above the same month the previous year.
It’s back again this year, despite the tough economy. “What we’ve found year in and year out is that it effectively moves our business,” says chief marketing officer Richard Castellini.
And then there’s GoDaddy. After Super Bowl XXXIX, it added race car driver Danica Patrick as a “GoDaddy girl,” and last year signed “The Biggest Loser” trainer Jillian Michaels. It’s gone from single digits to nearly 50 percent of market share in domain-name registry.
In some cases, the ads can work too well, especially if they’re linked to online giveaways. Dockers promised free pants in its ad last year and ended up mailing out twice as many pairs as it expected.
And Denny’s, whose free breakfast campaign created huge lines last year, is staying clear of the game. It has a new ad campaign that won’t be shown during the Super Bowl and won’t offer anything for free. The Associated Press
