• by February 3, 2005

SUPER - CALIFRAGIL - ISTICEXPI - HYPERBOWLIC - They call the NFL's championship game the "Super Bowl," but maybe it should be the "Superlatives Bowl." Or even better, the "Hyperbolic Bowl." Based on the marketing hype we've seen leading up to this year's game, we think it deserves the coining of a new word altogether: It's Super Hyper-Bowlic. The occasion? Well, Super Bowl marketing hype officially reached an inflection point this year in which the advertising, marketing and PR surrounding the game is now more important than the game itself. Hey, don't ask us. Just look at all the electronic and print media news outlets that are tripping over themselves to cover the new commercials that will run on Super Sunday, or what former Advertising Age Editor Fred Danzig long ago termed the "Big Ad Game."

Is the ad spin now really greater than the pre-game hype? It's hard to say for sure, though we'd love to see someone try to scientifically quantify it. We tried to do that using a much simpler and far more accessible barometer of pop culture: What people are posting on the Web. Well, what Google spiders of what people are posting on the Web. The result: the Super Bowl "game" did beat Super Bowl "advertising" by a margin of two-to-one. Actually it was 7,680,000 Google references to the game and 3,190,000 references to the ads.

Next we tapped the Nexis database to see how much editorial coverage the two Super Bowl subjects have generated during the past week. That result was a lot closer, but the "game" still won - 656 vs. 613 stories - albeit by a small margin.

Okay, so this doesn't scientifically prove anything. But over the next several weeks, a wide variety of researchers will be attempting to quantify the impact of the Super Bowl on marketers. Intelliseek will take a stab at measuring how much buzz Super Bowl advertisers get preceding, during and following the Big Game, utilizing a panel of blogs that discuss Super Bowl related advertising. Meanwhile, search marketing agency Fathom Online plans to track the volume of search activity using Super Bowl advertisers' brand names as keywords. And of course, there will be countless consumer polls competing to discern exactly which spots were most liked, most detested and most recalled.

But just when we thought we'd seen every imaginable way of hyping Super Bowl advertising, along comes European automaker Volvo with a campaign to tout ads it considered, but decided not to make for the Super Bowl. Wow! We've reached the point where a marketer is actually bragging about discarded ideas for advertising in a football game. Interestingly, unlike many other super marketers, Volvo has yet to unveil the concept for the ad it actually will run during its first ever Super Bowl buy on Sunday, but it has released four commercial "concepts" it rejected before developing the campaign it will use. They include:

1) "Volvo.com" -- Celebrating the five year anniversary of 17 dot-coms buying Super Bowl ads, Volvo developed a concept in their memory featuring high-priced celebrities, irreverent humor, abstract messaging and talking footwear to promote the new Volvo XC90 V8 SUV. "We tested our rough cut with focus groups and no one could understand it ... not even us," says Helen Gore, Volvo Cars of North America spokesperson.

2) "Take the Volvo Challenge" -- Riffing off the blindfolded taste test commercials of yesteryear, Volvo considered blindfolding drivers and asking them to test-drive a new Volvo and another brand's car. "For obvious reasons, our safety folks had a conniption over this one and it didn't make it off the drawing board," Gore confides.

3) "Soccer Mom Bowl I" -- A 30-second spot showcasing the first of a perennial battle royale football smackdown pitting suburban moms from West of the Mississippi River against suburban moms East of the Mississippi, with winners receiving a new Volvo. "We thought about this a lot, but then decided this whole East Coast/West Coast rivalry thing has got to stop before someone gets hurt," Gore adds.

4) "Safe Car. Great Design." -- In a crowded Volvo retailer, customers side over why they prefer Volvos, with one side chanting "Safe Car!" against the other side chanting "Great Design!" "Come to think of it, this is not such a bad idea; I don't know why we didn't go with this," Gore concludes.