Super Bowl XXXIV • Site: Georgia Dome • Kickoff: 6:25 p.m. EST Sunday • TV: ABC • Line: St. Louis Rams by 7½ • Discuss the Game • Who's Going to Win?

By John Schwartz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, Jan. 30, 2000; Page H1

It's their first appearance at the Super Bowl. Each took a vastly different path to the big time, and each side has a bit of stage fright. When it's all over, the one with the best strategy will succeed.

No, not the Rams or the Titans. It's the two Washington area technology companies that have thrown down millions of dollars to pitch their brands to today's huge captive television audience.

One of them is Vienna-based superstar Mi cro Strat egy Inc., the company with the rocketing stock price that helps other firms make sense of the mountains of data they collect. The other, Life Mind ers of Herndon, is newer and less well known, but it offers 7.5 million users free e-mail reminders on everything from Mom's birthday to the quarterly oil change.

Each company is making its first television ad. And each did much of the planning for the ads in-house. But there the similarity ends.

Joseph P. Payne, Mi cro Strat egy's chief marketing officer, compares his experience to that of the athletes. "I've definitely got the pre-game jitters," he says.

To understand why dot-com advertisers are clamoring to spend $2.2 million for a 30-second ad, consider what happened to the Monster.com Web site when its spot aired last year.

"Two minutes after our ad ran, we had six times our record traffic ever," said Jeff Taylor, chief executive of the online help-wanted company. A year later, 35 percent of viewers say they remember seeing the ad, according to a recent survey by Baltimore-based Eisner Communications.

In a world where entertainment and information have become balkanized into mini-tribes of cable users and Web surfers, the Super Bowl remains the last Annual National Event, the one place where an advertiser can be pretty much guaranteed a captive audience of 120 million.

Even more enticing for advertisers, 8 percent of all Super Bowl viewers this year will be in it for the ads alone, the Eisner survey found – about 10 million avid viewers.

In 1999, however, Monster.com had the field almost to itself. Now more than a dozen tech companies are jockeying for our attention.

"This year it's Super Bowl-dot-com," said Bob Garfield, a columnist for Advertising Age who writes an annual review of the cavalcade of puffery.

The online frenzy is all part of the transformation of advertising that high-tech riches have brought about.

Apple Computer Inc. broke the mold in 1984 with a literary-political-cheesecake spectacular about breaking International Business Machines Corp.'s iron grip on computing. (Those were the days!) But now Apple is an old-line manufacturing company, part of the national rust belt. The rules that Apple broke have been broken again.

"Most of the dot-coms don't have much of a customer base to speak of – they certainly don't have any revenue," Garfield said. "What they do have is IPO or venture-capital money – which they're blowing on the Super Bowl!"

If betting the company on a 30-second spot seems, well, weird, then welcome to the new economy, where image and buzz rule.

Old-fashioned companies had to laboriously build a brand name and generate customer loyalty, which you would then reinforce with an ad in the biggest Big Kahuna of all ad placements, the Super Bowl. The new paradigm, Garfield said, "is to advertise heavily with venture-capital money to get people on Wall Street to recognize your URL and overnight you have a paper worth exceeding the gross national product of Indonesia."

The networks and advertisers like to point to the soaring cost of Super Bowl ad time as evidence of the game's rock-solid hold on the American consciousness. It's true the cost of appearing on the game has risen dramatically. But that has everything to do with who's paying, and much less to do with who's watching.

In other words, the rising cost reflects the fact that more advertisers are chasing roughly the same amount of air time, which tends to goose the cost of a commercial. This inflationary spiral is at work in virtually every part of network television, from the Super Bowl on down to "Cops." Dot-com outfits are largely responsible for driving air-time prices to stratospheric heights. Internet-related companies bought $132 million in TV advertising during all of 1998; in just the first nine months of last year, the figure had grown to $277 million, according to Competitive Media Reporting.

Prepare to be dot-commed to death in today's telecast. Besides the return of Monster.com, ad- vertisers include Britannica.com, Kforce.com, Computer.com and Pets.com (the guys with the nattering sock puppet). All are betting that exposure during the game will enable them to capture a few more Web surfers.

Mi cro Strat egy has two ads, each of which will be shown once during the game and once during the pre-game show. The company's brash boss, Michael Saylor, dictated much of the story line from an evangelical spiel that he's been delivering for more than a year about delivering vital information directly to consumers. The company then hired expensive outside talent to make it happen. The ad's director of photography had given the movie "Fight Club" its gritty, otherworldly look, and saturates the Mi cro Strat egy spot with hues of green and blue that make it seem as if the near future will be viewed through a morphine haze. The ads show people getting alerts via the tiny screen on their cell phones: a canceled flight, a stock split, a creep using your credit card.

The company, which wants not for self-esteem, is throwing a vast gala for itself at FedEx Field today, having invited thousands to watch the game at club level, cheer for the ads – and, incidentally, to view a 10-minute documentary of the making of the Mi cro Strat egy ad.

We are, as Dave Barry says, not making this up.

Life Mind ers took a different approach. The company signed up for the time slot in November but then got cold feet about mounting such an expensive campaign. Negotiations to find another buyer, however, fell through in the first week of January – and the company had to come up with something or lose $2.8 million. Life Mind ers asked its usual agency, Fallon McElligot, if it could generate an ad in the few days they had before the network's deadline. The ad company declined – "They said 'No, we couldn't produce the kind of ad we'd be proud of,'‚" recalled Tim Hanlon, the company's vice president for marketing and communications. "So I went and produced the kind of ad I'd be proud of."

He reached out to former colleagues to see if they wanted to try to crash the project together. They readily agreed. "Most of us work our entire lives in advertising to make it to the Super Bowl," Hanlon said. "Ordinarily it's one of the crowning achievements of your career."

What they came up with was what the company proudly calls "the worst commercial on the Super Bowl." In many ways, they're right. (But not unique. A faux-amateurish spot for online broker E-Trade gripes, "Well, we just wasted 2 million bucks.")

The Life Mind ers ad is a stark series of three messages, a total of 40 words that tell the viewer "we don't know diddly about making ads." The implication is that the company does, however, know e-mail. The background music is a clunky rendition of "Chopsticks"; Hanlon says the professional pianist they hired refused to play it, so a technician did the job – using his knuckles to rap the keys. It's the "Blair Witch Project" of Super Bowl spots: "Our receptionist coulda done it," jokes company spokesman Todd Sutherland.

Production costs? Just under $60,000 – less than Saylor will spend catering today's fete.

Guess which one works better.

Saylor's opus is so slick that it gains no traction in the brain: The images flow by, leaving only the impression that the company might have something to do with cell phones, stock trading or perhaps travel arrangements.

Yet Mi cro Strat egy does none of that. Instead, it helps businesses organize their data, including software that could help the companies provide those services.

Life Mind ers' ad, on the other hand, is so straightforward that it's stupid. And just irritating enough to be memorable. In other words, effective.

Saylor defends his ad.

"We're thinking it's really important to get out in front of consumers," Saylor said.

Payne of Mi cro Strat egy said the tomorrowland-ish spots did well with focus groups. "They said, 'Hey, it looks very James Bondish.' And that's good, because that certainly was our intention."

Payne says the notion behind the high-profile ads is to begin getting consumers interested in such services so that they will push airlines and brokerages to offer them. Just as important, Payne says, the ad will reach the top executives of companies that will pay Mi cro Strat egy to help them develop the services. "Our biggest enemy is ignorance," Saylor says. "Once they know it is possible to wake your customer up and tell them that their plane has been canceled," they will demand the software. "That's our sweet spot."

Aren't there more targeted ways to find those people, though?

Not with the kind of focus they put on the game, Payne says: "What other event in the year do people actually grade the commercials?"

And for a company that gets millions of dollars out of every contract, a single sale would pay for the ads, Payne said. "If you get the right CEO watching and you get a deal with that CEO because he watched the Super Bowl, that was a good investment." Payne said one airline executive who merely read about the ads in a trade publication has already contacted the company to set up a meeting.

Besides, Saylor argues, the company's surging share price makes spending a mere few million dollars a fairly minor consideration. "The stock moves a dollar, that's $88 million, right? We've got a lot more to lose by not doing this." In fact, the day the company announced that it was going to pay millions to appear during the Super Bowl, its share price shot up by $12 – adding more than $200 million, or 40 times the cost of the ads, to the company's overall value.

Life Mind ers' investors are not as sure of their company's ad decision. Jack Biddle, whose venture-capital firm has heavily invested in Life Mind ers, is looking at the little company's big ad buy philosophically. "I personally wouldn't have done it, and it's a lot of money," he said. "But in the context of the size and scale of Life Mind ers' operations, it's not a big deal one way or another."

But will any of the new ads break out from the crowd? Last year Monster.com scored big with its adorable, memorable series of kids looking into the camera and announcing such career goals as "I wanna claw my way up to middle management" and "be replaced on a whim."

Monster.com became the new model for Super Bowl advertising. Jeff Taylor, Monster's chief executive, notes that traditional companies ran Super Bowl ads to strengthen the image of their brands: "People don't leave the game to buy a Pepsi or a beer."

Thanks to the well-made ad and reinforcing spots that brought the company's 1999 ad budget to $50 million, consumers learned the brand. Today about 35 percent of viewers recall seeing the Monster.com ad, according to the Eisner poll. By contrast, only 9 percent recalled seeing the Hot Jobs.com ads, which did not show the same kind of follow-through. Monster.com figures in the list compiled by Media Metrix of the 500 most-visited Web sites; Hot Jobs.com does not.

This year both Monster and Hot Jobs are back. But it's not clear that Monster's new campaign will have the same happy result. Using the same black-and-white cinematography as the previous ad, it shows people walking by a woman on the street, each speaking a line from Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." The company edited Frost's 20 perfect lines down to 10. (You can just imagine the "creatives" tossing that one around: "Frost, yeah. One of the greatest American poets, but, well, kinda wordy, y'know?") The slightly spooky spot is supposed to go for "a more serious yet impactful approach," the company says in its release.

Despite the outrageous expense, says David Blum of Eisner Communications, buying ads in the Super Bowl can make sense if done right. But that ad, Blum says, had better stand out – and it had better be followed up with a strong advertising campaign.

"It doesn't make sense to simply put your ad on and go away," he said. Three percent of viewers will look at the site right away, Eisner says – millions of Super Bowl Sunday surfers. Half of those who see the ad say they might take a look in the future – and "if I don't remind them tomorrow or next week or next month, that idea that 'I might go there later' is lost."

Will the ads get lost in the shuffle? Possibly, says Hanlon of Life Mind ers – especially since so many of the high-tech companies seem to value shock over substance. "There's a certain indulgence in the dot-com world, especially in advertising. There's a desire to out-weird one another in an effort to stand out. I think it's wasteful and unnecessary and oftentimes only serves the needs of the creatives, who don't necessarily care about whether the ad resonates with consumers and moves the client's business forward."

Blum disagrees, however, with the notion that the cluster of dot-com ads will cause them all to blend together. "It's a fallacy to think they're all in the same business. . . . It's like saying that there's a lot of retailers advertising this year," he said.

Oddly enough, both the Micro Strategy team and Life Mind ers are trying, ultimately, to create a new kind of medium. They want to sell the nation on what's known as "narrowcasting," completely personalized information, beamed directly to you the moment that you need it. And yet, there they are at the Super Bowl.

"It's a little ironic," admits Payne. "We're using the largest event of the year to introduce the world to narrowcasting."

Staff writer Paul Farhi contributed to this report.