• Advertising Age, Thursday, September 17, 2009 9:15 PM

Ad sales for the Super Bowl on Feb. 7 are moving more briskly than expected, given the sorry state of the economy. CBS has sold approximately 70% of its inventory for the game, including two spots to Hyundai. The automaker will use its in-house agency Innocean to craft the spots.

Hyundai joins a roster of advertisers that includes: Careerbuilder, InBev Anheuser Busch, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and GoDaddy.com. Bridgestone will again be the half-time sponsor and gets two 30-second spots in the game.

CBS has sold ad time for top positions for prices between $2.5 million and $3 million and has pushed blocks of ad time in pre-game broadcasts, say insiders. To put things in perspective, NBC had sold more than 80% of its Super Bowl inventory at this time last year. In 2007, Fox was nearly sold out of inventory by late October.

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