If you think CBS had it tough selling Super Bowl spots in an ad market the consistency of pudding, try launching an entire new sports league.
   Vince McMahon’s Xtreme Football League begins its 10-week season this Saturday at 8:00 p.m. on NBC, and with time ticking away there is still plenty of ad inventory left unsold.
    The league has sold about 60 percent of its ad time, significantly less than the 75 percent it hoped to have out of the way by the first kickoff.
    "We hit an extremely difficult, soft market," says Bob Riordon, vice president of advertising sales for the XFL.
    That means that many advertisers are recoiling from the $1.75 million price tag the XFL has put on its season-long ad packages. 
    But ad economy be damned, Riordon says he has no plans to cave in to pressure to cut those rates.
   "We’ve been holding our rates. We want to get the logs closed and get this thing settled, but there will not be a fire sale at 4:00 in the afternoon on Friday," he says.
    An off-season football league is obviously a risky proposition, particularly when one figures in the "McMahon factor." 
   Many advertisers are not comfortable jumping into the sex-and-violence gig before they know exactly what it will look like. Some viewers probably feel the same way.
   For that reason, Riordon and the XFL are confident that sales will pick up once the product, and the ratings, are out in the open. 
    The XFL will "make good" to advertisers if the ratings fall short of an aggregate nine or 10 across NBC, UPN and TNN.
   The first few weeks of play will probably produce inflated numbers as viewers sample the new league, but what happens after that will be the true test.
   "The next couple of Saturdays will get big audiences and a lot of coverage. All of that is potentially artificial inflation," says Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television.
   "Even after that there may be a lot of people who get into it and then get tired of it, sort of like ‘Millionaire.’ It may be two years before we can decide whether the XFL has a long-term future in sports."
    Still, early numbers padded by lots of initial sampling could make selling out this season’s inventory a great deal easier, particularly once advertisers see that sex and dismemberment will, hopefully, stay off the field.
    The way the media treat McMahon’s league will also have a lot to do with its legitimacy.
    "A big question is how the news and sports journalists will cover the sport. Obviously, they don’t cover the WWF in sports pages. But my guess is that because they’re going to have gambling, they will cover it in the news," says Thompson.
    Gambling is perhaps an under-appreciated force in the world of sports, and McMahon was shrewd to factor it into his plans.
    "You take away the friendly office pool, and I think sports audiences could plummet dramatically. It’s important that they decided not to script the XFL so much that you couldn’t gamble on it," Thompson explains.
    So far, fan interest in the XFL seems to be fairly strong. More importantly, there is strong interest among non-traditional sports fans, meaning that the XFL will probably not be relying entirely on the same already-fragmented audience that watches football, baseball and basketball.
    Research by Harris Interactive shows that among adults 18-24 expressing interest in the XFL, 58 percent are women.
    Also, XFL fans tend to be tech junkies.
    "Perhaps contrary to popular belief, the high-tech crowd seems to be the core constituency of the XFL. 
    "In fact, high-tech activities, internet usage, etc., are the rule, while the non-techies seem to be the exception," says a Harris research report.
    Among XFL fans, 81 percent play video games, 61 percent buy high-tech electronics, 58 percent use cell phones and 69 percent visit sports sites on the web.
    People who identify themselves as "die-hard, avid fans" of the XFL are also 60 percent more likely to appreciate technological enhancements to the game itself, such as the yellow first-down line and athlete microphones.
    That tendency could reverberate across other sports.
    "Already we can see the major networks respond to the high-tech coverage expected from the XFL. If they do well, more traditional sports will have to respond to it, and we could see more elements of the XFL bleeding into traditional sports," says Thompson.
    If that happens, perhaps high-tech companies will start to take a greater interest in the new league. As it stands, most of the XFL’s advertisers are more traditional companies already invested in sports marketing.
     Honda, Gillette, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, Burger King, Anheuser-Busch, Proctor and Gamble, Gatorade, Warner Brothers Motion Pictures, Universal Studios, MCI, 20^th Century Fox, Miller, Harley-Davidson and Wolverine Boots and Shoes have bought packages with the XFL.
    Conspicuously absent are consumer-electronics companies and dot.coms.
    But the XFL’s Riordon insists that the selling is far from over.
    "I’m not done selling this week," he says. "We still have aspirations of doing a lot more business."

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