Shut out of the Super Bowl for more than three decades, Molson Coors is back in the Big Game, partnering with DraftKings on a whimsical $500,000 beer commercial contest.

Fans who correctly guess the most “prop bets,” such as how many guys with facial hair will appear in the Molson Coors commercial during the first half of Sunday’s game, will win a share of the prize money. The company behind Coors Light and Miller Lite may have already won, just by being there.

Molson Coors and other brewing giants were able to buy ads in the Super Bowl because Anheuser-Busch InBev gave up its exclusive rights as a game sponsor after 33 years. Industry analysts are already calling this year’s broadcast the Beer Bowl, with Heineken, Molson Coors, Sam Adams and Anheuser-Busch all scheduled to run ads in a wide-open commercial field.

“It took less than a minute for us to decide to buy an ad once we heard that exclusivity was no longer,” said Sofia Colucci, vice president of marketing for Miller brands at Molson Coors. “We’ve been waiting for over 30 years for this moment, and we finally have the keys to the big stage.”

Super Bowl LVII between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs will be broadcast on Fox beginning Sunday at 5:30 p.m., and commercials for the game sold out at a record price — upward of $7 million per 30-second spot.

The Big Game remains the pinnacle of TV advertising in a fragmented media world. Last year, Super Bowl LVI on NBC generated more than $578 million in advertising, with the average 30-second commercial selling for $6.5 million, according to research firm Kantar.

The Los Angeles Rams’ 23-20 win over the Cincinnati Bengals drew an average audience of more than 112 million viewers last year, the best Super Bowl ratings in five years.

Advertisers are not only paying a premium for that enormous real-time audience, but also seeking to create a commercial that wins the post-game scoreboards and gets people talking on Monday.

The last time Molson Coors appeared in the Big Game, “Da Coach” was prowling the sidelines for the Bears and fans were hearing echoes of the “Super Bowl Shuffle.”

In recent years, Molson Coors has relied on guerrilla marketing campaigns to create some peripheral buzz around the Super Bowl.

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