ADVERTISERS READY FOR BIG SHOWDOWN.

Byline: Skip Wollenberg Associated Press 

The Super Bowl XXXI roster is set. The players are anxious to show their stuff. A huge crowd will show up to watch.

The advertisers - not just the football teams - are ready for a showdown today on a telecast that annually serves as the ad world's showcase event.

Veteran Super Bowl commercial warriors like Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi and Nike are lined up with rookies like Fila shoes, Intel computer chips and Dirt Devil vacuums in a can-you-top-this pursuit of TV's biggest audience.

On the field in the Louisiana Superdome, the Green Bay Packers and New England Patriots will decide the NFL championship.

Fox Broadcasting says 30 advertisers paid a record average of about $1.2 million for a half-minute commercial during the game.

The advertisers are hoping for an audience in excess of 100 million viewers to justify the steep price as well as the frenzied effort that went into creating many of the commercials.

The brewer Anheuser-Busch has bought more time on the Super Bowl telecast than any other sponsor - four minutes - and pitches its best-selling Budweiser and Bud Light ads.

It leads off with a 60-second commercial called ``Power Surge'' that involves a fictional citywide power outage. The ad was directed by Breck Eisner, the son of Walt Disney Co. boss Michael Eisner.

In the brewer's other ads, a Bud bottle drops into an unsuspecting caveman's life, a chicken takes a star turn and two new characters are introduced to pitch Bud Light.

The Bud frogs have been limited to a fleeting cameo role in a pre-game commercial in which the winning number in the ninth annual Bud Bowl will be disclosed.

Models and other celebrities abound in Super Bowl ads.

Pepsi-Cola, which is introducing its ``Generation Next'' ad theme with three minutes of in-game commercials, has Pepsi-sipping models Cindy Crawford, Tyra Banks and Bridgette Hall peek into a hospital nursery in one commercial. They indelibly impress a newborn boy.

Crawford also appears in a commercial for Cadillac's new Catera model, playing a princess rescued from boredom by an animated duck who has the keys to the new Caddy.

Banks also is working overtime on the Super Bowl, appearing in a Nike ad as a guest at ``Li'l Penny'' Hardaway's big party. Nike has milked its roster of big-name athletes to fill the house in this 60-second commercial.

Dirt Devil vacuums has obtained the rights to use movie clips of dancer Fred Astaire, and has created the 15-second ads that were edited on a computer to make it appear that Astaire danced with its vacuums rather than a cane, a coat rack and other stage props. Astaire died in 1988, but his widow Robyn gave her consent for the ads.

Visa recruited former GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole for an ad.

Pepsi has actor Robert Stack in a humorous ad that shows off the Pepsi Club, a device that can be attached to a Pepsi can to make sure no one steals the drink. And Shaquille O'Neal finds the missing ingredient to a happy life playing basketball for the Los Angeles Lakers in the hands of Michael J. Fox, sitting courtside in another Pepsi ad.

Coca-Cola, meanwhile, is back in the Super Bowl for the first time since 1991, and is hoping to have more luck than Pepsi did with the launch of Crystal Pepsi on the 1993 telecast. Crystal Pepsi flopped.

Coca-Cola is introducing Surge, a new citrus green designed to compete with Pepsi's successful Mountain Dew with teens and young adults.

But in an unusual arrangement with the Fox network, Coke will advertise Surge only in about 140 scattered markets where the drink is available. In other markets, representing about half the country, it will run ads for Diet Coke.