[Oyabun]

Millions tune in for Super Bowl, and ads

AP - Millions of viewers tuned in to watch the American football Super Bowl, the most-viewed program all year on US television.

Indianapolis beat Chicago in a rainy matchup that featured a half-time performance by Prince and the usual assortment of high-priced and oddball TV ads.

The NFL Super Bowl attracts some 90 million viewers. The TV network CBS charged as much as $US2.6 million ($A3.4 million) for a 30-second advertisement during the game, in which the Indianapolis Colts beat the Chicago Bears 29-17.

The weather wasn't kind this year and in a south Florida soaker the football squirted loose and bounced all over the waterlogged field.




At half-time, Prince took to the stage and sang through the deluge - the violet stage lights shining into the storm to make the perfect setting for his hit finale, Purple Rain.

Even those TV viewers who do not follow football often tune in for the ads, because many companies unveil their cleverest, brand-new commercials to take advantage of the large audience.

Along with the trademark Budweiser Clydesdale horses, talking animals and high-end computer graphics, there was a new entry this year in the annual showdown of advertisers in the NFL Super Bowl Super Bowl: amateurs.

Starting in the first quarter, a goofy spot for Doritos chips showing a hapless driver distracted by a pretty woman passing by marked the first time a purely amateur-created advertisement aired during the Super Bowl. Frito-Lay, the PepsiCo division that makes Doritos, ran an online competition to pick the winning spot.

Katie Crabb, a university student, was the winner of a separate contest by General Motors and had her idea for an advertisement made into reality by Chevrolet's marketing division.

Despite being made by a newcomer, that advertisement was true to the tradition of using oddball humour in Super Bowl ads, showing a number of men stripping off their shirts - and some other articles of clothing - at the sight of a new Chevy HHR rolling down the street.

Sight gags were back, including one from Bud Light early in the game showing a rather unusual tactic for winning at rock-paper-scissors - throwing an actual rock at the head of your opponent.

FedEx combined a sight gag with another trademark of big ticket Super Bowl spots, fancy computer graphics, with an other-world advertisement showing an office worker drifting off into space from the world's first office on the moon, only to be clobbered by a passing meteor.

Some of the uses of humour did not resonate well with experts. Stephen Greyser, a professor at Harvard Business School specialising in communications and the business of sports, said the rock-throwing spot by Bud Light was "attention-getting" but also "had a nasty character to it".

The job-search company CareerBuilder ditched its longtime office-monkey pitchmen of years past in favour of a jungle combat scene among office workers, where office supplies become weapons. Think of Dilbert meets Lord of the Flies.