The Super Bowl is advertising’s biggest single event of the year, but its costly commercial time rarely goes to promoting actual ad businesses. Denver-based startup Epidemic Marketing made itself the exception in 2000 with this spot laying out its pitch: Insert ads in your outgoing email, get a cut of any sales that result.

Agency Geppetto Group came up with a way to explain the unique proposition on a short time frame, Epidemic said in an announcement two days before the game. “They met our objective to create a Super Bowl quality spot under very aggressive time scales,” Director of Marketing Mary Lee Arend said in a press release then. The commercial begins in the bathroom at The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Like many of the startups in the dot com bowl of 2000, which was played less than two months before the Nasdaq began to slide, Epidemic wasn’t in operation long enough to consider an encore in the 2001 game. But affiliate marketing programs operating on similar principles for web publishers would become increasingly lucrative.

Geppetto’s Marc Greengrass and Chris McKee later opened the agency Flint & Steel in New York.

Director: Francis Lawrence. Production company: DNA Productions. Chief creative director: Chris McKee. Art directors: Steve Ingkavet, Pete Bregman. Copywriter: Marc Greengrass. Editing: Brass Knuckles. 

BRAND: Epidemic Marketing

YEAR: 2000

AGENCY: Geppetto Group

SUPERBOWL: XXXIV