Excerpted from SUPER BOWL GOLD: 50 Years of The Big Game.

Careers can be defined by a Super Bowl performance--not just for players, or halftime entertainers, but also for the actors in the game's much-anticipated commercials. Consider the case of Jesse Heiman, whose face is more familiar than his name. Nerdy and decidedly plump, he has appeared in scores of movies and TV shows as an extra.

But Heiman's fame soared during Super Bowl XLVII, when he was featured in a GoDaddy ad making out with supermodel Bar Refaeli, supporting the company's "where smart meets sexy" campaign. The next day Heiman logged on to Yahoo! and saw himself and Refaeli on the front page. A documentary crew began following Heiman around to see if the Super Bowl spot could propel him into the showbiz foreground. He even landed his first starring role, in a short film. "What people remember from that game," Heiman says, "are the lights going out [in the Superdome] and me."

Companies spend so much on Super Bowl ads chasing the same hope: that after the game, people will be talking about them. That's why advertisers go all out, pulling stunts to grab viewers' attention. By going for the big score, they increase the sense that the Super Bowl is a special occasion.

In the early years Super Bowl ads weren't much different from others, though some did prove memorable. In 1974 Master Lock ran its classic spot in which a marksman pierces the body of a lock with a bullet. (Master Lock appeared in 21 Super Bowls.) Six years later Joe Greene's "Hey kid, catch" ad for Coca-Cola appeared during Super Bowl XIV.

The modern phenomenon of the Super Bowl ad traces to 1984, when Apple aired a 60-second spot titled "1984" that was more short movie than traditional ad. It re-created the atmosphere of George Orwell's book and only mentioned the upcoming launch of the Macintosh computer at the end, with the promise "You'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984." People in the ad game viewed "1984" as a watershed. "The industry was moving to a very fast, 15-second kind of world," says Peter Daboll, CEO of Ace Metrix, which measures the effectiveness of video advertising. "That ad was the start of the story-telling genre."

The appeal of the long advertisement rose even as those Super Bowl seconds became ever more expensive. In 1967, a 30-second spot cost $42,000-about $300,000 in today's dollars. For the 2016 Super Bowl, a 30-second spot will cost a record $5 million. Networks can charge advertisers so much because the Super Bowl provides an extreme version of what sports offer--a television program that is watched by a large audience at the same time.