Fox's Super Bowl ad rates top all earlier levels for big game.

News Corp.'s Fox television network is charging a record average of $2.4 million for advertisements on the Super Bowl in February, 6.7 percent more than last season's National Football League championship game.

Anheuser-Busch Cos., maker of Budweiser and Bud Lite beers, is buying 10 of the game's 58 30-second commercial spots at that price, said Tony Ponturo, vice president for global media and sports marketing at the St. Louis-based company.

The Feb. 6 Super Bowl in Jacksonville may generate $139 million in revenue for Fox, based on that rate, and help the network boost sales as viewers spend more time on cable TV, the Internet and video games. The Super Bowl has been the best-rated TV show every year since 1995, giving advertisers an opportunity to appeal to a mass audience, Ponturo said.

Fox, the fourth-ranked network in audience ratings, had sold about 90 percent of its Super Bowl ads as of last week, said Karen McCallum, a media buyer at McKee Wallwork Henderson in Albuquerque, N.M. McCallum said she has negotiated ad purchases on the broadcast for clients she declined to identify.

The Super Bowl's average ad price will probably rise as game day approaches because advertisers may be willing to pay more for scarce spots, Ponturo said.

Super Bowl ad prices have risen each year since the January 2002 game, when lower demand for advertising after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks cut the price 4.8 percent to $2 million from a year earlier.

The 2004 program drew the highest Super Bowl audience ratings since 2000, with 41.4 percent of the 108.4 million U.S. households with televisions tuning in.

The NFL is completing the seventh year of an eight-year, $17.6 billion contract with Fox, CBS and ABC and ESPN to broadcast football. Fox is paying $550 million a year for its portion of the agreement to broadcast games.

News Corp. loses money on its direct investment in football, said Paul Kim, an analyst at Tradition Asiel Securities in New York. The broadcasts let the company package ads for other programming and promote DirecTV Group Inc., the satellite-television service it owns a 34 percent stake in, Kim said who rates News Corp. shares "hold" and doesn't own them.

"Fox has grown tremendously by its emphasis on big league sports," said Peter Jankovskis, research director at Lisle, Ill.-based Oakbrook Investments LLC., which manages $1.1 billion, including shares of News Corp. "Some popular programs have benefited from their initial launch on the Super Bowl."