For $3 Million Super Bowl Ads, The Best Placements May Be The Free Ones

For those marketers who can’t afford the nearly $3 million for a 30-second spot during next weekend’s Super Bowl on Fox, the web still offers a lot of cheaper options. And for advertisers that did pay, the free placement on AOL (NYSE: TWX), MySpace, YouTube and elsewhere might be the best deal of all, a WSJ piece outlines.

While most Super Bowl advertisers appear to have decided to forgo preview ads this year, there are a few notable exceptions. So far, Pepsi, which will kick off its 1-billion MP3 giveaway on Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) with a spot during the Super Bowl, began running ads on Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) this past weekend.

But the main emphasis for online-related Super Bowl marketing will be after the game airs on TV. Last year, YouTube attracted 28 million users to its Super Bowl Ad Poll, while AOL said that the Super Bowl TV spots it ran were viewed more than 40 million times. While not close to the 90 million who watched the game on TV, the numbers have clearly made an impression on marketers and are expected to be higher this year.

And by running these free ads, the sites expect to be able to see more ad revenue by selling ads against their Super Bowl promotions. Verizon (NYSE: VZ), which has never bought time during the actual game, is the main sponsor of AOL’s Super Sunday Ad Poll. While Paramount Pictures did buy time during the Super Bowl broadcast to highlight its forthcoming Iron Man film, it has made sure to lock in a three-year ad deal around the event with ESPN.com.

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