Firm in make-or-break Superbowl bet

Imagine for a moment that you have a young company, a start-up. You are doing okay so far, and some of your clients are the big names in their field. The problem is, no one seems to know who you are. This is particularly frustrating because your main competitor has had a fair amount of press attention, and you think you have something better to offer.

Do you: a) sit down with a good advertising agency and craft a strong media strategy, including print, radio, maybe even television advertisements; b) gnash your teeth and curse the luck of your sworn enemy; c) create a home-grown advertising campaign which you carefully test-drive in local media first; d) blow half your annual revenue on a single extraordinarily costly television advert, which will only run once?

If you have even the vaguest understanding of the Internet business, of course you realised the deep wisdom of option d.

That, at any rate, is what a company called Hotjobs.com is hoping, because that is the choice it has made. Hotjobs.com, which provides a successful web jobs-listing service, but which has been overshadowed by rival Monster.com, will spend $2 million (€1.73 million) - half of its 1998 revenues - on one 30-second advert which will air this weekend during the annual American football extravaganza, the Superbowl.

Will it get them noticed? Sure - it already has. Last week, a few articles appeared in Silicon Valley newspapers and online technology news services mentioning that a company which wished to remain anonymous would, in essence, bet the company on a single, blow-out advert.

Whether it really wanted its identity to remain secret, or whether that was just a teaser to draw the inevitable speculation and hyped "revelations" in the online media of the company's true identity, does not matter. Publicity it got.

Choosing the Superbowl for your advertising debut is not a bad bet either.

Adverts are so expensive to air around the event that companies go all out on spectacular presentations. In recent years, viewers have known they will get to see state-of-the-art computer animation from some of the top animation studios in the country, the same ones doing special effects and feature films. The newspaper USA Today has run a viewer's ratings poll of the advertisements.

Since most companies do not have the deep pockets to splurge on such opulence, Superbowl adverts have always come from the big corporations. Hotjobs.com is going to be the mouse that roared, and that alone has its appeal to the US mindset, which loves feisty confidence and make-or-break courage.

Because of the advanced hoopla about the advert, people certainly will be watching for the Hotjobs.com spot. The point of the advert, though, is not so much that it wants more people to use its service, but to heighten its profile. More likely, it is really looking for some venture capital investment, or to be picked up by some larger entity which would like to add an Internet property to its portfolio of companies.

The gamble is not unique. In 1984, a technology company single-handedly launched the advertising fever which now grips the Superbowl. It introduced the first film-quality, whiz-bang computerised special effects to the sporting event's advertising breaks. It gradually built up expectation for its adverts which nobody had seen before, but which it promised would be revolutionary. So everyone waited excitedly to see the spot.

The company? Apple Computer. The product? The first Macintosh - which it called The Computer for the Rest of Us. It did pretty well off that advert, a spoof on George Orwell's 1984. In it, Big Brother was understood to be IBM, not Microsoft. Oh how times have changed.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie