Yesterday, in Part 1 of my series on the Super Bowl, I went over the performance of the 5 companies that have advertised the most during the big game in the past 20 years. Today I want to look at what has happened to the biggest advertisers in the past year.

The list of those companies can be found here. As you can see, the list is almost identical to the list of the 5 biggest advertisers over the past 20 years. Normally, when backtesting returns, we want to be careful not to compare a basket of returns (stocks over the span of 20 years) to a subset of that same basket (those same stocks over say 15 years). But since here we are comparing 1 year’s return to that of 20, I think the test is still valid.

Since Jan 1 of 2006 until now, the stocks of the top advertisers in last year’s Super Bowl have together returned an average of 25% to their shareholders. In that time, the S&P 500 has returned only 15%. So once again, the big spenders outperform the market. Super Bowl Advertisers 2, Market 0.

The capitalist in me likes this kind of result. After all, these are big companies that have been around a long time and know a thing or two about marketing. At the same time, the Super Bowl has proven itself as a major cultural and economic event, especially when it comes to marketing purposes. Just this past week, Forbes ranked the Super Bowl as the worlds most valuable sporting event, ahead of the summer Olympics and the World Cup. I like results that show when the biggest and best spend the most money on the most watched cultural event of the year they get rewarded for it. It show’s that smart risk gets rewarded, and that is what business is all about. Come to think of it, that is what football is all about too. Maybe the Bears will put the ball in Rex Grossman’s hands early and ask him to make some big plays early, surprising both the Colts D and the bookies.

Tomorrow, in part 3 of this series, Ill look at the companies speculated to be the biggest advertisers during this Sunday’s game, and set us up to track their performance going forward as well.

Omid Malekan