Marketing, Chicken Legs, and Sports Capitalism: Super Bowl Notes

Inauguration Day was the Super Bowl in our house (fumble John Roberts, touchdown America), and KDLT still hasn't figured out how to beam a strong enough digital signal to reach Lake Herman, so that football game a bunch of millionaire steroid users are staging today barely registers on the Madville Times radar. But if NBC can sell $206 million in ads for a four-hour stretch (over a quarter-billion for the whole day), the event must have some cultural relevance. In recognition of the event, some semi-random trivia:

• "All iconic brands refresh themselves to be relevant and contemporary..." PR line from PepsiCo, repeated verbatim this morning on NPR by a company hack explaining why it's a brilliant idea to spend millions of dollars to rebrand Gatorade to just plain G. Sure to be a hit among FFA and AARP members at KFC.
• Exercise necessary to burn off the calories from two fried chicken legs: 3,200 "Waves."
  
• Inventor of The Wave: Krazy George... and 47,000 Oakland A's fans at the Oakland Coliseum, October 15, 1981.
• Amount Tampa Bay taxpayers shelled out to build Raymond James Stadium: $168.5 million.
• Amount Tampa Bay Buccaneers and über-sports-capitalist Malcolm Glazer shelled out to build Raymond James Stadium: $0.
• Increase over previous year's January sales tax revenue Tampa Bay experienced when it hosted Super Bowls in 1991 and 2001, respectively: –0.96%, +3.1%.
  
• Perecentage of Republicans on President Obama's White House Super Bowl party guest list: 27%.