5 NFL Sponsors Being Upstaged at the Super Bowl

Procter & Gamble (PG)

The conglomerate has worked so hard and paid so much to establish its Old Spice as the NFL's deodorant of choice that it would be tragic if some other underarm product beat it to the punch.

Especially if that product is pubescent America's masking agent of choice.

Sadly for P&G, Unilever (UL) picked this year to give Axe deodorant its first Super Bowl commercial and wasn't exactly subtle about it. For its $4 million, Unilever is both pitching the favored odor fighter of high school locker rooms across America and offering customers 23 seats aboard a private spacecraft for a trip beyond the atmosphere to promote its new Axe Apollo brand.

P&G, meanwhile, has grounded its ad department for this year's Super Bowl and seems content to gaze up at the stars and dream of what could have been. Never mind that faint smell of awkwardness and changing vocal ranges in the background.

-- Written by Jason Notte in Portland, Ore.

>To contact the writer of this article, click here: Jason Notte.

>To follow the writer on Twitter, go to http://twitter.com/notteham.

>To submit a news tip, send an email to: [e-mail].

RELATED STORIES:

>>5 Big CES Products That Tanked

>>10 Cities Poised For Greatness In 2013

>>5 Most Infamous Cars Of 2012

Jason Notte is a reporter for TheStreet. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Esquire.com, Time Out New York, the Boston Herald, the Boston Phoenix, the Metro newspaper and the Colorado Springs Independent. He previously served as the political and global affairs editor for Metro U.S., layout editor for Boston Now, assistant news editor for the Herald News of West Paterson, N.J., editor of Go Out! Magazine in Hoboken, N.J., and copy editor and lifestyle editor at the Jersey Journal in Jersey City, N.J.

« First ‹ Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6