Super Bowl Ads:Who is behind them?

By VICTOR GODINEZ /
Super Bowl ad-watching is as much of a sport as the football game itself, and a company based in Irving makes almost all of it possible.DG FastChannel Inc. is the clearinghouse for most of the multimillion-dollar ads that will be shown on CBS during Sunday's game.

Advertisers shoot their spots and send them to DG, which digitally transmits them to broadcasters.

You won't see DG's name anywhere on the screen as talking animals and dancing babies and the various extravaganzas battle for your attention during halftime and timeouts, but the company's presence will be huge nonetheless.

"If you look at the Super Bowl, there will be 120 commercials, and our company will ship the vast majority to the broadcaster," said Scott Ginsburg, chairman and chief executive at DG FastChannel.

DG gives big advertising agencies and big broadcasters a single contact to deal with. Advertisers pay DG to distribute their content to TV stations.

"We've taken out a lot of that stress between the two, and we've also allowed the consolidation of a whole series of people between the four large agencies," Ginsburg said. "We deal with every single agency in the country and the world, and allow them to get all their material to these broadcasters and cablecasters."

DG FastChannel can also handle last-minute edits to commercials, such as tagging local car dealer names onto the end of national automaker ads.

But as much hype as the Super Bowl gets – according to a new Nielsen survey, 51 percent of people prefer the ads to the game – this is actually DG's slowest time of year.

"The fourth quarter is our busiest quarter," Ginsburg said. "First quarter, we certainly like the Grammys. We like the Super Bowl. But those are really just deliveries to one location."

Over the last few years, DG expanded its expertise in high-definition video and is distributing a growing number of online ads.

"Last year was not a good year for any traditional media, and it was somewhat mediocre for most of the online business compared to most of the growth they had seen," he said. "But it was still a growing business. So there is a secular shift away from traditional media into new media."

DG FastChannel is growing steadily. Its third quarter sales in 2009 rose to $48.3 million from $41.4 million a year ago.

Profit jumped to $5.4 million from $2.3 million.

DG has 750 employees, including 180 locally, and that number is also set to expand.

"In 2010, for all our businesses, we're looking for revenue growth, and with the revenue growth, we're going to be hiring both operations and salespeople," Ginsburg said.

But even if you snag a job there, don't expect any previews of next year's hot Super Bowl ads.

Many are closely kept secrets right up until they air. Thirty-second spots sold for a minumum of $2.5 million this year.

Ginsburg himself hasn't seen any of the current batch.

"Privacy is important, and it wouldn't do [the advertisers] any good to have ... a bunch of people talking about them on the Internet," he said.