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* Sprint made its two humorous Super Bowl ads available to its subscribers for freedownload to their cell phones. The company also encouraged subscribers to vote fortheir favorite ad and for their favorite song by the Rolling Stones during their halftimeperformance. Mary Nell Westbrook of Sprint said, “It’s a way to extend the brandduring what is one of the most enormous viewership days in TV” (Howard, 2006).* Disney aired pre-Super Bowl ads featuring a host of NFL players practicing thefamiliar “I’m going to Disney World” refrain that had aired after past games. Thecompany also actively promoted the fact that it would reveal its player spokesman forthe first time ever immediately following the game (Lindeman, 2006).* Even the National Football League itself got into the act. For the first time, it airedSuper Bowl ads on its own NFL Network, and also promoted the ads on nfl.com andits NFL mobile phone system (Howard, 2006).Another area of opportunity for Super Bowl advertisers in 2006, and indeed forseveral years prior, has stemmed from the growth of Web sites that are either entirelydevoted to, or at least featuring a significant section on, Super Bowl ads. The pastseveral years have seen a growth in Web sites that offer some combination of SuperBowl ad playback, previews, evaluation, news, message boards and other interactiveelements.For example:* Superbowl-ads.com features a home page with a large window called “Latest News.”The site offers a toolbar with links back to 1998 plus a link titled “All Time.” It alsohas links to research from Multivision and Intelliseek.* Adbowl.com offers viewers the chance to vote on their favorite Super Bowlcommercials. Page one features registration for this year’s competition plus links to pastresults. Visitors can search past years with the top five listed in different demographiccategories.* Ad-rag.com was once a free-standing Super Bowl site, but is now merged withAdland, “the beyond-a-blog, commercial-laden delirium of heaven and hell for advertisingaddicts ‘round the world” (http://commercial-archive.com/). The Super Bowl is stilla prominent link from the left-hand column.2007 Super Bowl XLIIn the seemingly expanding effort to draw attention to the actual Super Bowl ads,companies developed some novel approaches for 2007. Much of the pre-game publicityrevolved around viewer-generated ad concepts for at least three advertisers.Chevrolet kicked off the idea in September, 2006 when it proposed a contest forcollege students. Parent company General Motors invited students to submit ideasfor ads that would tout the Chevrolet lineup, specifically the Aveo, Cobalt, HHR, andEquinox cars targeted to a younger demographic. GM reported more than 820 studentteams registered from more than 230 schools in 46 states and the District of Columbia(General Motors, 2006). Five finalists received all-expense paid trips to Detroit topresent their ideas to GM and ad agency personnel. The CBS Early Show presentedmock-ups of the ads on the first two Wednesdays in January and invited viewers tovote on their favorite (CBS News, 2007). The winning team participated in the actualproduction of the spot.Frito-Lay jumped into the user-generated fray by inviting consumers to create and34Feedback January 2009 (Vol. 50, No. 1)