Another "ultimate game" comes and goes. This one, unlike most, was a close contest. My only rooting interest was that both would lose the game. It would have been historic if they both had but pretty much impossible if I know my NFL rules. So if one of these northeastern outfits had to be declared the best team of the year I'm glad it turned out to be the team my Cowboys beat twice this season. That and a dollar fifty gets ...
The nation's eyes were trained on the commercial announcements imbedded in the telecast. Rumor has it that the dalmation training the Clydesdale spot was a fave as well as the giant carrier pigeon for FedEx. The Coke ad with the parade balloons was very good I thought.
But the most interesting thing to me was the overwhelming number of commercials for companies selling water in a plastic bottle. I lost track of all of them there were so many. They even had one with Shaq as a jockey and another featuring lizards dancing with some woman I'm pretty sure I was supposed to recognize. In fact one water-in-a-bottle purveyor was the sponsor of halftime. Not the halftime show itself-- that was sponsored by some tire company-- but the part of halftime made up of yakking by the Fox Sports crew. It gets confusing.
Anyway, there had to have been over $20M spent on advertising designed to get people to buy water in a bottle. Which leads me to suspect that there is a huge markup on water in a bottle.
I kind of figured out it was a high margin business when I noticed that people would spend more for a gallon of water in plastic bottles than they would for a gallon of gasoline. Notice that the nation's oil companies don't buy ads in the Super Bowl? That's because oil companies only make about 10 cents on a dollar. Selling something that falls from the sky for free is a lot more profitable apparently. With margins like that you can even get Shaq to pretend to ride a racehorse.
Bottoms up.
