Small businesses that produce dog treats, toys, eggs and compost are vying for a chance to have a commercial during the Super Bowl.
The four companies are finalists in a competition held by software maker Intuit, which will pay millions of dollars to give the winner a 30-second spot in the game Feb. 2. They were selected by Intuit's 8,000 employees. The winner will be chosen in a vote open to anyone who visits the competition website: www.smallbusinessbiggame.com through Dec. 1.
The finalists are Barley Labs, of Durham, N.C., which makes dog treats out of barley; GoldieBlox, based in Oakland, Calif., maker of engineering toys aimed at girls; Locally Laid Egg Co., a Duluth, Minn., egg producer and POOP — Natural Dairy Compost, a Nampa, Idaho, fertilizer maker.
All four businesses are young. Dairy Poop was founded this year, while the others were launched in 2012.
Barley labs makes treats from grain left over from beer brewing, while POOP uses cattle manure to manufacture fertilizer. GoldieBlox's products are blocks and other toys that teach girls about engineering and construction. And Locally Laid Egg produces eggs from hens that live in pastures rather than in coops.
Nearly 15,000 small businesses entered the contest during the summer. Intuit employees voted for the 20 best, and that field was winnowed down to four. The make the final four, a small business had to prove that it could handle the bump up in business that a Super Bowl ad could give it.
Super Bowl ads are usually run by huge companies and brands like Budweiser and Chevrolet, not small businesses. Intuit has never had an ad of its own. But some famous ads have been run by companies that were not yet giants, including Apple Inc., which ran an ad in 1984 that raised the public's awareness about the impending launch of the Macintosh.
The ads give a company of any size great visibility; more than 100 million people are expected to watch the game.
The advertising agency RPA, which has created Super Bowl ads in the past, will create the spot. It is creating ads for all four finalists, but only one will be seen on the Super Bowl. The others will be shown at other times.
Daniel Craig Embraced Openness For Role In Director Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer”
Daniel Craig is sitting in the restaurant of the Carlyle Hotel talking about how easy it can be to close yourself off to new experiences.
"We get older and maybe out of fear, we want to control the way we are in our lives. And I think it's sort of the enemy of art," Craig says. "You have to push against it. Whether you have success or not is irrelevant, but you have to try to push against it."
Craig, relaxed and unshaven, has the look of someone who has freed himself of a too snug tuxedo. Part of the abiding tension of his tenure as James Bond was this evident wrestling with the constraints that came along with it. Any such strains, though, would seem now to be completely out the window.
Since exiting that role, Craig, 56, has seemed eager to push himself in new directions. He performed "Macbeth" on Broadway. His drawling detective Benoit Blanc ("Halle Berry!") stole the show in "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery." And now, Craig gives arguably his most transformative performance as the William S. Burroughs avatar Lee in Luca Guadagnino's tender tale of love and longing in postwar Mexico City, "Queer."
Since the movie's Venice Film Festival premiere, it's been one of the fall's most talked about performances — for its explicit sex scenes, for its vulnerability and for its extremely un-007-ness.
"The role, they say, must have been a challenge or 'You're so brave to do this,'" Craig said in a recent interview alongside Guadagnino. "I kind of go, 'Eh, not really.' It's why I get up in the morning."
In "Queer," which A24 releases Wednesday in theaters, Craig again plays a well-traveled, sharply dressed, cocktail-drinking man. But the similarities with his most famous role stop there. Lee is an American expat living in 1950s... Read More