UK Athletics pays $17,000 for Super Bowl halftime commercial
February 4, 2014
By Nick Gray
UK Athletics paid $17,000 for a 60-second local halftime commercial slot during Super Bowl XLVIII on Sunday night, said UK Athletics spokesman Tony Neely on Monday.
The football commercial was narrated by UK head coach Mark Stoops and featured 17 current players.
“It felt like what we needed to do,” Neely said.
Last year, the athletics department paid $10,000 for a 30-second local commercial during the halftime of last season’s Super Bowl, UK spokesman Jay Blanton said.
This year’s commercial slot re-introduced the growing brand of UK football to local viewers for the first time since the end of the two-win 2013 season, said Stephen Dittmore, associate professor of recreation and sport management health at the University of Arkansas.
The commercial showed rising senior defensive ends Bud Dupree and Za’Darius Smith and seven early enrollees from UK’s top-25 ranked 2014 class, including four-star quarterback Drew Barker.
Barker was wearing a gray uniform that has never been worn in a game but had been discussed by UK players and coaches on social media.
Dittmore said UK’s lack of success in the past forces the program to explore other ways of re-establishing a brand.
“It is a captured audience of football fans,” Dittmore said. “It reminds them that there is football there locally.”
Dittmore said he sees no issues with the “cost-effective” use of money to advertise in front of what has annually been the largest viewing audience of the year.
“If you have 46 percent of Lexington residents who are viewing the game, it is an inexpensive way to reach customers,” Dittmore said.
UK Athletics teamed with Cornett Integrated Marketing Solutions, an advertising and marketing firm based in Lexington, to produce the commercial, which was filmed on Jan. 20.
UK Athletics has not received the exact cost it took to produce the commercial, Neely said.
“I don’t see where programs who are winning and are successful need to do this (commercial),” Dittmore said. “(The commercial investment) creates more pressure on Kentucky and the staff to create a brand.”