Super Bowl ads
sold out again
Fox quickly resells Pizza Hut's spot after it drops out
By Bill Cromwell
Feb 2, 2011
The Super Bowl is sold out once again.
A day after Pizza Hut pulled out of Sunday's game, Fox quickly sold the 30-second spot to another advertiser.
Though the network would not say who had bought it, several advertisers reportedly approached Fox after the game sold out in October and told the network they'd be interested in any inventory that became available.
One of them likely stepped in yesterday to grab the spot at a reported price of $3 million.
Pizza Hut did not explain why it decided to drop out of the game; it is retaining its pregame ad buys.
Usually networks are still shopping their final Super Bowl ads in the week before the game, but this year the game's entire inventory was sold out in October, which media people attribute to the stabilizing economy and the huge popularity of football this year.
Media people expect Sunday's game will equal or surpass last year's record viewership of 106.5 million on CBS with storied franchises the Packers and the Steelers competing for the title.
"Fox didn't know this when it started selling, but if it had known when it was setting the price that Green Bay and Pittsburgh were playing, it would have asked for more than $3 million," one media buyer tells Media Life.
Meanwhile, the advertisers who have been locked in to their spots for months have been hyping their ads this week.
Twentieth Century Fox said yesterday that it will air the first Super Bowl ad with an embedded code, which viewers can scan with their iPhones. The embed is tied to the wildly popular app Angry Birds.
And Lipton Brisk Iced Tea said it will feature rapper Eminem in a Claymation ad.
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