On Super Bowl Sunday this Feb. 1, Douglas Stayman and his MBA marketing students will be back at it again studying every move – not of the players but who is advertising and why – and who is getting the most bang for the buck.

Stayman, an associate professor of marketing at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, has been leading his students in the rite of dissecting the ads nearly every year for the past eight years. In that time, he has seen the ads' selling price rise from just over $1 million to this year's record price tag of $2.3 million for just 30 seconds of viewers' attention.

An expert on advertising patterns, he also has seen his share of advertisers capitalize on the opportunity to reach millions of viewers and launch new products, as well as fail to reap the rewards of the exorbitantly priced spots. In 1998, for example, an ad for McDonald's featuring top athletes got noticed, but later some viewers remembered the spot as being a Nike commercial.

This year, despite the steep price, the high-visibility Super Bowl spots (more than 135 million viewers watched in the United States alone last year) are more in demand than ever, with most slots already sold, reports Stayman.

One new advertiser to watch for is AOL, which is spending heavily on three spots to promote TopSpeed, the built-in Web accelerator in its AOL 9.0 Optimized Internet access software, he notes.

Look for the return of such regular advertisers as Budweiser, Pepsi and Frito-Lay – whose products are tailor-made for watching football, says Stayman.

He also expects to see ads from the major Hollywood studios for big upcoming movies – although running them in February comes with some risk because most movies aren't likely to screen until the spring or summer.

Political ads, however, are out. CBS, which is airing the game, ruled against accepting any advocacy ads, including one from MoveOn, a grass-roots group with an anti-Bush message.