NEW YORK - The Super Bowl can be a scary but rewarding place, and not just for the football players. This year several first-time advertisers, including Planters nuts, showed they've got what it takes to compete with marketing powerhouses like Anheuser- Busch Inc.

Cars.com and Bridgestone Firestone North America also turned in solid freshman performances, but some of the most memorable entries came from Coke.

Back in the game last year after an absence of nine years, Coca-Cola Co.'s main brand was an even bigger presence this year. A spot playing on the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade featured giant balloons shaped like cartoon characters chasing after an inflatable bottle of Coke, high over the rooftops of Manhattan.

Another Coke spot featured political rivals James Carville and Bill Frist, getting over their differences with a Coke - then tooling around Washington on Segway scooters.

Rival PepsiCo Inc. had several spots in the game as well, some of them more quizzical. A spot for Pepsi's Diet Pepsi Max featured a series of people nodding off to sleep, including a man at a deli counter with a preposterously large comb-over, who are revived with a jolt of caffeine.

The odd bent of the Pepsi commercials led one set of reviewers, a panel of MBA students led by Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, to declare that ''Coke got the better of Pepsi'' this year.

Also scoring high on Calkins' list this year was a spot for Tide to Go, a portable cleaning product from Procter & Gamble Co. In the ad, a distracting stain on a job applicant's shirt winds up blowing his interview.

Kraft Foods Inc.'s Planters nuts division delivered a clever ad featuring a plainlooking woman sporting a full monobrow. She still manages to drive men crazy with a secret scent - essence de cashew nut, applied by liberally rubbing cashews against the neck.

Cars.com, an online classified ad company owned by Gannett Co., Tribune Co. and other newspaper publishers, employed car shoppers who didn't have to resort to a ''plan B'' to get what they wanted from the car dealers.