How to Buy a Super Bowl Ad for Exactly 1¢

Admit it. You've always dreamed about seeing your company's big fat brand on a Super Bowl broadcast. To most marketers, that outcome is highly unlikely.

Enter CollectiveCommercial.com. The website, started by two Quebec-based entrepreneurs, launched today and aims to sell enough micro ads (in the form of pixels) to buy an entire Super Bowl commercial. Really. It seems they'll attempt to do this for a variety of high profile broadcast events throughout North America.

"The ultimate goal of CollectiveCommercial.com is to air its TV commercial during the SuperBowl XLIV (2010) or XLV (2011) once 80% of the pixels will be sold in the video," CollectiveCommercial's website says. "Of course, to do this, we need the broadcaster to accept broadcasting our commercial, so all the content is screened for quality assurance."

Each company's pixel will include a hyperlink back to the company's website. In theory, the more pixels, the more your company will get noticed. By the looks of things, there are 814,053,000 pixels left.

In 2005, MillionDollarHomepage.com became an internet phenomenon by selling $1 pixels that ended up grossing the site's owner $1,037,100.

Do I think this will work? No. It is fun to write about? Sure!

CollectiveCommercial's website goes on to say:

"Another objective of CollectiveCommercial.com is to pave the way for a new world record for the greatest number of sponsors in a single 30 seconds TV commercial. This will bring significant visibility that will be beneficial to our sponsors."

82% of you said people will pay $20 to "crowdfund" a NASCAR Sprint Cup primary sponsorship. So how about 1¢ for your piece of a Super Bowl commercial?

This probably takes splitting sponsor assets and pass-through a little too far, but there's a good lesson here. Partnering with peer brands can open up bigger opportunities, previously inaccessible to many brands. That can apply to sponsorship at any level.