By Cliff Peale
The Cincinnati Enquirer

John Lucking, owner of Lucking Advertising Products, holds a Charmin seat cushion his firm produced as a promo for Procter & Gamble's first Super Bowl ad. (Craig Ruttle photo)

John Lucking has been working with Procter & Gamble Co. for years, providing specialty promotional merchandise for its products.

But when P&G called him last year for 2,500 seat cushions for a new Charmin campaign, it was more than the everyday commercial opportunity. This one had a new target: the Super Bowl.

"When you can be associated with a campaign with this kind of visibility, it increases our credibility," said Lucking, president of Lucking Advertising Products in Hyde Park. P&G will distribute the cushions throughout the week.

The seat cushions feature the theme of Charmin's Super Bowl ad - "soft and strong for your end zone." It's the first time in P&G's storied history that it's bought a time slot on the world's biggest advertising showcase.

For P&G, which spends more than $4 billion a year globally on advertising, Charmin's campaign is much more than simply the single, 30-second television commercial that will air in the game's first half.

VIDEO CLIP

• Clip of the P&G commercial (2.8 MB mpeg file - requires video plug-in)

Its "Potty Palooza," a 53-foot truck with 27 bathrooms on board, will be parked in downtown Houston most of this week. The bear featured in Charmin's past campaigns will be evident, both in the ad itself and at events throughout the week. There are in-store displays to bolster the campaign in stores throughout the country.

Charmin is even importing the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders to do a song-and-dance called the "Charmin cha cha cha."

High profile

Some of the more memorable Super Bowl campaigns are from the past. Remember Apple Computer's Macintosh ad? Or the puppet hawking the now-defunct Pets .com?

Yet Sunday's Super Bowl on CBS still will hold the nation's attention as much for its ads as for the Carolina Panthers-New England Patriots matchup.

There will be several ads for erectile-dysfunction products, a new campaign from Staples Inc. and the usual mix from Super Bowl stalwart Anheuser-Busch Co. The going rate is the highest ever at almost $2.3 million for a 30-second slot. Last year, the broadcast attracted more than 88 million viewers.

Many ad industry veterans don't see the same quality in the Super Bowl ads but acknowledge that it's still the highest-profile showcase in the industry.

"I think everybody agrees that the breakthrough nature of the content is not what it was," said Jerry Malsh, head of the former J. Malsh & Co. advertising agency in Cincinnati.

Bear costumes

Besides Lucking's company, several other smaller Cincinnati companies are involved in the program touting Charmin, which won an internal P&G competition to air the commercial.

ASAP Event Advertising in Lincoln Heights manages the more than a dozen bear costumes used for publicity events, one of which is featured in the Super Bowl ad. It also created the football jersey that the bear wears in the commercial.

Smurfit Stone Container Corp. helped make some of the in-store displays.

And Interbrand's Cincinnati office helped design the new Charmin packaging featured in the ad.

The package, hitting store shelves now, for the first time in decades does not include a picture of a baby, but instead the Charmin bear, said Bill Rempe, the senior account executive at Interbrand for Charmin.

E-mail cpeale@enquirer.com