The lineup of brands to be promoted Sunday during the CBS broadcast of Super Bowl XXXVIII is taking on more of a male appeal than has been the case in recent years.

Among those to be featured in commercials, costing an estimated record price of $2.3 million for each 30 seconds, will be the Gillette shaving products, making their first Super Sunday appearance in a decade. Others include two drugs that treat erectile dysfunction, Cialis and Levitra; Cadillac, Chevrolet, Dodge and Mitsubishi automobiles; and Budweiser and Bud Light beers. There will even be a spot from Procter & Gamble, for Charmin bathroom tissue, with football players.

And most of the movies likely to be advertised during the game by the Columbia, Touchstone, Universal and Warner Brothers studios are aimed at men: "The Alamo;" "The Bourne Supremacy," with Matt Damon; "Catwoman," with Halle Berry; "The Chronicles of Riddick," with Vin Diesel; "Starsky & Hutch"; and "Troy," with Brad Pitt.

"We don't go to the Super Bowl every year," said Peter K. Hoffman, president for blades and razors at the Gillette Company in Boston. "When we have big news, we will go to the showcase event that more men watch" than any other television program in a typical year.

The news from Gillette for 2004, he added, is the introduction of an updated version of a brand-image campaign, carrying the theme "The best a man can get," that originally appeared in 1989.

The remaking of the campaign to play up what Mr. Hoffman calls "the feeling of Gillette" comes as the company confronts the strongest challenge in years from its longtime rival in the shaving category, Schick-Wilkinson Sword, which has the new Schick Quattro four-bladed razor.

"This is a critical time for Gillette," said Jonah Disend, president at Redscout in New York, a corporate strategy consultant. "It had a superior product for so long that men bought into Gillette whether or not they bought into the image."

"Now that Gillette's facing much more competition," Mr. Disend said, "it needs people to buy the brand as much as the product."

A 60-second commercial from the Gillette agency, BBDO Worldwide in New York, part of the Omnicom Group, is intended to present Gillette to the estimated 50 million men who watch the game, Mr. Hoffman said, as "the company that's the best in the shaving business for men, from a product-performance point of view and from an emotional understanding of men's needs to look, feel and be their best."

The tilt toward male viewers represents a return to old-school form. From the first Super Bowl in 1967 through the 1980's, most commercials were for products like cars, shaving cream, motor oil and beer. "Back in the days when men were men," Bernice Kanner writes in a new book, "The Super Bowl of Advertising: How the Commercials Won the Game" (Bloomberg Press), the "target was the Archie Bunker man."

That began to change after the big game became more of an annual unofficial national holiday, with millions of women joining men at Super Bowl Sunday parties, and more of a showcase for creative advertising from marketers like Frito-Lay, MasterCard, Pepsi-Cola and Visa, selling to both sexes. Indeed, in most years more women watch the Super Bowl than watch the Academy Awards, despite that show's common description as the Super Bowl for women. The true Super Bowl for women, it turns out, is the Super Bowl.

In fact, it is the presence of so many women in the audience that is attracting Cialis into the Super Bowl, said Carole Copeland, a spokeswoman for Eli Lilly & Company in Indianapolis, which is marketing the drug to consumers in a joint venture with the Icos Corporation.

"What's a better place to be than where men - and their partners - are enjoying the game and paying attention to the advertising?" Ms. Copeland asked. The content of the Cialis commercial, being created by Grey Worldwide in New York, part of the Grey Global Group, is being kept under wraps until the game, she said.

Gillette, on the other hand, plans to release copies of its commercial today, and offered a preview of the spot last week. The fast-paced commercial uses far less traditional imagery than before; the men are younger, for instance, and there are many more models who are neither blond nor white. Also, the script that is read by a voice-over announcer, as well as the lyrics of a jingle heard in the spot, are much more conversational, colloquial and casual than in previous commercials.

"It's a guy trying to express to other guys what it's like to feel great," said Al Merrin, vice chairman and executive creative director at BBDO New York.

"It's quite a change, a big step forward into this century," he added, "because it's more contemporary, more sexy, and the images are a lot more inclusive; you don't have to be the perfect guy."

Mr. Merrin said the goal for Gillette advertising was twofold: to convince men that Gillette is "the best at what it does, product-wise; and to make the brand emotionally acceptable and likable."

"But we'd been losing touch" with the brand goal, he added, so "the assignment was to re-energize, contemporize and emotionalize it."

Mr. Merrin and Mr. Hoffman said the plans to update the Gillette brand image, and kick off the effort with a Super Bowl spot, were in development well before the Quattro introduction by Schick in September.

"Yes, there's some competition," Mr. Hoffman said. "But, our response to Quattro is the Mach3 Turbo Champion razor and a retail display blitz in the fourth quarter." The Champion is a variant of the top-of-the-line Mach3 Turbo. Gillette also plans a May introduction of a battery-operated razor, the Mach3 M3 Power, he added.

Gillette has responded aggressively on the legal front, too, charging in a lawsuit that by selling Quattro, Schick's parent, Energizer Holdings, infringed the patent of Gillette's best-selling Mach3 products. On Jan. 15, a federal district court judge denied a Gillette motion for a preliminary injunction that would order Quattro razors and blades removed from retail outlets.

The judge ruled that Quattro could be sold until the Gillette patent-infringement lawsuit was decided. Gillette appealed the decision the next day to a federal appeals court.

Schick in turn has sued Gillette for false advertising, charging that Gillette can no longer assert it offers "the best a man can get" because Quattro provides superior shaves.

"We sometimes feel like we've run into the schoolyard bully on our way home," said Joseph E. Lynch, the president of Schick, based in Milford, Conn. "We don't view ourselves as a threat" to Gillette, he said.

A dogfight between giant corporations - now that's something that appeals to some American men as much as, if not more than, a mere football game.

Source : http://www.nytimes.com