By halftime, you may know more about erectile dysfunction than you do about the Patriots. The stakes in these commercial-break battles are huge, the costs astronomical. We pick the winners.

When football fans settle in to watch the Carolina Panthers take on the New England Patriots this Sunday in Super Bowl XXXVIII, they’ll be witnessing intense rivalries among top players. And in between the commercials where those rivalries play out, sports fans will also be watching a football game.

The off-field rivalries extend far beyond the usual vying for attention by advertisers, which will be paying $2.3 million for 30 seconds on average.

Sports fans who also are astute investors will spot deeper -- and more meaningful -- rivalries at work as well. Specifically, they'll notice that top players in three intensely competitive consumer markets this year are bringing their fights to the Super Bowl airwaves. Here’s the other Super Bowl contests you’ll see:

Contest #1: The battle of the “male enhancement” drug. Rivals Eli Lilly (LLY, news, msgs), GlaxoSmithKline (GSK, news, msgs) and Pfizer (PFE, news, msgs) will be duking it out to win over fans for their Cialis, Levitra and Viagra erectile dysfunction (ED) pills. Our pick: Pfizer.

Contest #2: The battle for the moviegoer. This features the titan Warner Bros., a division of Time Warner (TWX, news, msgs), going up against Touchstone Pictures at Disney (DIS, news, msgs), Universal Studios at Vivendi (V, news, msgs), and Sony Pictures, a division of Sony Entertainment (SNE, news, msgs). Our pick: Time Warner’s Warner Bros.

Contest #3: The battle of the automakers. Car maker General Motors (GM, news, msgs) will continue to try to win over younger drivers to its classic Cadillac brand, while DaimlerChrysler (DCX, news, msgs) will pitch Dodge models and Mitsubishi Motors (MMTOF, news, msgs) will advertise as well. Because of several long-term challenges to the auto sector that none of these players can escape, we predict this contest will go into an overtime period that never ends.

Here’s how we picked our winners in these three parallel Super Bowls playing out alongside the football action and the five minutes worth of Budweiser ads.

'Male enhancement' drugs

If you think you’ve see enough “male enhancement” ads in your e-mail to last you a lifetime, just wait until you watch the Super Bowl this Sunday. No fewer than three erectile dysfunction (ED) drug makers will by vying to increase their market share with expensive ads during the big game.

They include relative upstarts to this particular market, Eli Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline, which will be plugging Cialis and Levitra. The third, of course, will be Pfizer, whose well-known Viagra got the ball rolling on ED drugs a few years back.

Who has the ED product with the most potential? We don’t know from experience, but analysts at J.P. Morgan point out that Cialis lasts the longest -- up to 36 hours -- and it has the least risk for interacting badly with other things that users eat or drink. Since rivals Cialis and Levitra came on the market, though, growth in Viagra prescriptions has remained strong -- recently coming in at about 300,000 per week.

Ultimately, however, heavy spending by the drug companies to promote ED drugs may make them all winners because it will simply increase the size of the market so much. “They are going to get a lot of visibility, so I would expect the market to grow, and they will all get their fair share,” says Linda Miller, portfolio manager of the John Hancock Health Sciences fund (JHGRX). An estimated 70 million men in North America and Europe suffer from ED, but only 10% have sought treatment, says Morningstar analyst Heather Brilliant.

Instead, to figure out which of these three major drug companies will win the pharma Super Bowl ring, take a step back and see who has the most potential in two key areas: drug development pipeline and ability to cut costs. Here, Pfizer wins. “Lilly has a pipeline, and Glaxo has cost cutting, but Pfizer has it all, both cost cutting and a pipeline,” says Miller. Pfizer is a top-10 holding of her fund. The fund also owns a much smaller position in Lilly, but it doesn’t own Glaxo.

As many as five potential blockbusters are rolling out of the Pfizer pipeline right now, says J.P. Morgan analyst Roopesh Patel, including Caduet and Inspra for heart problems and hypertension, Pregabalin for epilepsy and anxiety disorder, and Macugen for macular degeneration. He expects 20% earnings growth this year, and he has a $45 price target on the stock.

“Glaxo is not pricey, but we don’t see the new products,” says Miller. “Unless Lilly goes through another round of consolidation, they don’t really have more cost cutting right now.” As for Icos (ICOS, news, msgs), which is teaming up with Eli Lilly in the launch of Cialis, Hancock’s Miller thinks the high cost of promoting the new ED drug will weigh on results for a while. “The first year of a drug launch is risky and very expensive. These are very expensive products to advertise,” she says.

Source : http://moneycentral.msn.com