Super Bowl Commercials: A Look Back At Early Ads (VIDEO)

The Super Bowl commercials are such a big deal now that it's hard to conceive of a time when they weren't so omnipresent. But when the game began in 1967, most companies treated it like any other match.

Back then, it cost around $75,000 to buy ad time during the Super Bowl. That's the equivalent of about $505,000 in today's money -- a mere fraction of the $3.5 million companies are actually paying for a 30-second spot.

We here at HuffPost Media consider ourselves students of history, so we couldn't help but include some of these early Super Bowl commercials in our occasional series "A Look Back." They stretch from 1969, two years after the first Super Bowl, all the way to 1979, when the game was much more entrenched in the culture. We tried to select a sort of grab bag of ads, but what stands out the most is how relatively simple these spots are in comparison to the budget-busting, elaborate commercials we see today. Take a look below.

Oh, and our eternal thanks to adland.tv, whose database of early ads was invaluable.