"America doesn't want to see a brand that's going to completely freeze and stop selling things," said Scott Keogh, chief marketing officer of Audi of America.
Last year's Audi spot, which spoofed "The Godfather," cost $6 million to make, said David Shoffner, spokesman for SpotBowl.com, a website that allows viewers to vote on their favorite ads. Audi says its commercial was seen 600 million times on TV and the Internet. Those numbers prompted the car maker's executives to hop back in to this year's game.
Research suggests companies can get a Super Bowl bump. Two University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire professors studied the stock market for the two-week period surrounding the 2008 Super Bowl. Publicly traded companies that advertised during the game outperformed the Standard & Poor's 500 index by 2%, the professors found.
With 4 1/2 minutes of advertising time already reserved during this year's game, brewer Anheuser-Busch will have 30 seconds more than last year. The ads will feature Clydesdale horses, O'Brien and either the Bud Light Lime or Budweiser American Ale brands.
"Regardless of the economy, we're still going forward," said Bob Lachky, Anheuser-Busch's chief creative officer. "We still have to run our company. We still have to sell beer."
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alana.semuels@latimes.com
Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.
