Fishburne to offer "red pill" or "blue pill" choice at Twenty Fourteen Super Bowl
This is the Super Bowl where ads may offer a bit less of the same — and a bit more of the unexpected. As the price of ad time continues to escalate, advertisers continue to seek new ways — and new reasons — to stand out or even surprise. At a record $4 million per 30-second slot, "it's the most expensive ad time on television by a wide margin," says Jon Swallen, chief research officer at Kantar Media. The Super Bowl, he notes, "marches to a very different beat than the rest of the TV business." And so, too, must the advertisers who want to stand out during the Feb. 2 broadcast on Fox, which is sold out of ad time. Here are something they are doing differently for 2014: • More first-time celebrities. As usual, there will be lots of celebrities in Super Bowl ads, but more will be first-timers. Laurence Fishburne, the straight-faced star of the 1999 hit sci-fi film The Matrix , will show up with a humorous twist on the cult classic in a Kia ad s...