NEW YORK — Do Super Bowl ads work? Well, of course they do. Cobalt, the auto-marketing group, detailed that at the Borrell Local conference this week. Hyundai launched a new Sonata with two commercials during the Super Bowl — and it paid off.

“Hyundai tripled lead production and page-views” over the previous, routine Sunday, “and that’s what the Internet is all about,” said Max Steckler, VP of advertising products for the Cobalt Group, during a session at the Borrell Local conference yesterday.

Steckler spoke during a Monday afternoon series of presentations about “working with portals,” which was kicked off by Lem Lloyd, VP of partnerships at Yahoo (who wryly noted that “I’m not sure the term ‘portal’ really works any more.”).

Google and Microsoft also presented their versions of participation in their relationships with various providers, from Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium and yellow pages relationships, to Google’s with Cobalt and Yellowbook, and Microsoft’s with Advance Internet.

Earlier on Monday, Jennewein, Hendricks, Potts and McGuire talked at length about hyperlocal sites, following a 20-minute presentation by Jarvis. Jarvis’s presentation is here. Potts said his company started out trying to create hyperlocal sites by aggregating local bloggers and other local information, but found that local media companies wanted to work with his new company, GrowthSpur.com. (Potts is the guy who burned through $3 million in venture capital with the failed hyperlocal company Backfence Inc.)

Jarvis presented financial projections showing that creating local and regional networks of hyperlocal sites could lead to multimillion-dollar revenues and ROI.

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