The Super Bowl is as big of a cultural and business event as it is a sporting event. I am looking forward to the game, as well as all the media tracking that go with it. Others who are interested in this sort of thing may want to check out Nielson Company’s guide to the game, and learn interesting facts like last year “Indianapolis viewers purchase above average amounts of sausage, buns, and brats than the average viewer” where as in Chicago “Viewers … tend to purchase more bagged nuts, beer, frozen poultry and meat than the average viewer.”

Last year, web hosting and mirroring company Akamai tracked the site traffic of major Super Bowl advertisers before, during and after the game, and they will be doing the same thing this year.

Most Wall Street people I speak to are busy discussing whether the Bears will be able to establish a run game early enough to keep the ball away from Peyton Manning (and perhaps even their own QB), but what I want to do is investigate whether there is an investment edge surrounding the Super Bowl.

To start things off, I did the following study: Looking at the top 5 companies that have advertised during the Super Bowl in the past 20 years, have their stocks outperformed? The companies included in the study and their advertising habits can be found here.

For my backtest, I assumed that I invested an equal amount in each of the companies mentioned on Jan 1 of the first year they aired a Super Bowl add, and held that investment until today. Such a strategy would have yielded a total return of 1,044% from the time of the first investment in 1987 until today. That’s a big return, but not shocking considering it caught the great rally of the 90s. So what would have happened if in a parallel portfolio I just invested in the S&P 500 every time we invested in one of our 5 companies? That strategy would have yielded a total return of 881% today.

So far, the score is Super Bowl Advertisers 1, Market 0.

More to come in Part 2.

Omid Malekan