Forget betting on the Super Bowl: Save your seat ticket stub instead

By Dian Vujovich

With the Super Bowl Sunday days away, bets about who is going to win and lose are flying around right along with talk about which commercials will yield the greatest rewards to their advertisers. And the most laughs. But if making money is one of the reasons you’re watching the game, one extraordinary way to cash in might be to simply save some  game chatzkies. And then wait.

Okay. You won’t be an overnight winner but decide to play the collector’s game and hold on to the right ticket stubs, somehow get a winning team’s ring or quarterback’s helmet and the roar of the crowd could be the sound of you cashing in.

Super Bowl memorabilia has rewarded more than one collector over the years. Dan Marino’s Super Bowl XIX helmet, for example, sold for $33,460. in May 2007 and Lawrence Taylor’s 1991 championship ring fetched over $230,400 at auction in May 2012, according to a recent piece in the Robb Report Collection February 2013 magazine. Time will only tell how much a winning team’s jersey, pair of diamond studded team cufflinks or a series of ticket stubs could return.

And you thought the big money was in the football pool. Ha!

Speaking of big money, by now you’ve heard that a 30-second spot at the Big Game is going for $4 million. But spending that kind of cabbage isn’t always the best thing a company can do to increase review.

Sure it’s true that E-Trade’s talking baby commercials got them noticed five years ago with their Super Bowl ads— they brought in a huge spike in new business and no doubt played a hand in keeping the company in business as the stock that year had dropped 80 percent— but not all Super Bowl advertisers are as fortunate.

In a recent Yahoo Finance piece, Brad Adgate, research director at Horizon Media, reported that 42% of dot.com companies went bankrupt about a year after advertising in the 2000 Super Bowl.”  Maybe the timing was just off.” He makes a good point as the Tech Bubble burst two months after that Big Game.

Research in Motion, RIMM, will be advertising on Sunday. With their stock not responding well to the company’s new BlackBerry introduction it’s anybody guess how that Canadian company will fare.

My advice? If you can’t sleep with the winning team’s quarterback, at least make sure he passes his ring, jersey and helmet on to you before the divorce.