Acro bytes by Kurt Foss

One of the ironies of the annual Super Bowl event is that the actual football game more often than not ends up being anything but memorable — with some notable exceptions. This Sunday the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears hope to take part in an exceptional contest, and there undoubtedly are a few good story lines, such as the first two African-American head coaches to achieve the National Football League championship.

But given the entertainment spectacle the Super Bowl has become — now in its XLI year — many people around the world who tune in actually have little or no interest in the game itself. Increasingly, the focus has become the television commercials and the competition among the various big-spending sponsors to get the best ratings … or at least the most laughs.

The San Francisco Chronicle is catering to this weekend’s ad-watching viewers, posting for download from its website a set of PDF-based Super Bowl bingo cards. Designed to “create some excitement at your Super Bowl party,” the set of made-to-print cards [PDF: 272kb] are meant to encourage party guests to bet on the commercials, as follows:

“Contestants buy their boards when they arrive at your party. Throughout the game, they cross out squares as commercials air.”

As with traditional bingo, “the first contestant to score a horizontal, vertical or diagonal row wins a prize.”

There’s also a set of blank bingo cards [PDF: 34kb] — you’ll need to print and then fill in the different ads. (See the official list of sponsors at Advertising Age.)

After both the game and the bingo competition, find out who won the ad wars at Advertising Age’s Super Bowl coverage site.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 4:23 pm and is filed under PDF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.