Businesses including Sprint Nextel Corp., Levi Strauss & Co. and Mattel Inc. are sponsoring college classes and graduate-level research to get help with their online marketing from the young and hyperconnected. Sprint, for example, supplies a class at Boston’s Emerson College with smartphones and unlimited service in exchange for students working gratis on the company’s local Internet push.

Universities, in some cases, receive funding or proprietary consumer data from companies for their research. Students get experience they can display on their résumés, and add lively classes to the usual mix of lectures and written exams.

“We are helping students to go out and get hired,” says Randy Hlavac, an instructor at Northwestern University’s Medill School. “They’ve done the work.”

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To be sure, the pressure is on for Groupon to become the household name for daily deals.

Awareness of LivingSocial recently spiked after the company leaned on its investor Amazon to stage a one-day deal that offered a $20 gift card for 10 bucks. Likewise, after Groupon spurned Google’s $6 billion takeover offer, the search giant is likely to build a daily deals competitor of its own.

So, when the Pittsburgh Steelers face off against the Green Bay Packers on Sunday, we know who will be paying really close attention to Groupon’s debut TV appearance.

Not just the viewers, who pay notoriously close attention to the interstitials, but Groupon’s investors, like Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, all of which will be curious to see where their nearly $1 billion is going.

The idea of a Super Bowl commercial is smart if the cards are played right.

“The Super Bowl is an incredibly powerful venue for new and emerging companies. It’s a chance to step out on a national stage,” said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, who blogged about some of the companies trying to make a big splash at this year’s game.

Since the company’s business is being replicated by dozens of clones in every major city, to varying degrees of success, it’s all about creating exposure and name recognition. ”Google has all the resources in the world. It’s hard to fight someone like that unless you have something to protect you….All you really have is a strong brand to fall back on,” Calkins said.

But it is not exactly a touchdown. There have been fumbles, and private companies backed by millions of dollars bring up bad memories of the dot-com days, when start-ups and newly minted IPOs failed to deliver on their promises.

Groupon will also have the hard job of creating an effective advertisement that tells its story without being too artsy.

“They’ve got a big creative challenge ahead to explain the product and deliver a benefit in a way that breaks through in the Super Bowl. If they aren’t careful, they will run an ad creative that’s interesting but doesn’t explain the product,” Calkins said.

UPDATE: Groupon posted one of the commercials it rejected today on its blog, which is confessions of a Groupon addict.

Groupon is not providing any of the details–like whether there will be a star or how it will explain what the company is all about–but it has hired CP+B and Publicis Groupe’s Starcom as the lead agencies to do the heavy lifting.

Whatever Groupon does, expect it to have a viral component that extends the momentum after the 30 seconds is up.

Take CP+B’s genius stunt it pulled for Burger King called the “Whopper Sacrifice.”

The campaign gave Facebook users an excuse to dump some of the random childhood buddies or co-workers that had friended you over the years in return for a free Whopper. If users removed 10 friends, they’d get the burger.

Only four days after launch, tens of thousands of people had been sacrificed.

On the flip side, it also runs the risk of selling something so well that it can’t meet the demand.

“If I were Groupon, I would have some pretty big offers coming up over the next week. If the ad is successful at bringing new customers to the site, you then want them to have a good experience,” Calkins said.

Groupon will also have to deal with a surge in traffic, or a spike in first-time orders that could result in a high number of customer service inquires.

When LivingSocial conducted its Amazon gift card offer, it learned this the hard way. The company’s systems were overloaded, leading to delayed confirmation emails, credit-card charges and customer service responses. It also had to weed out people who were trying to game the system by trying to buy more than one gift card. The surge can all be explained by the hundreds of thousands of novices hitting the site all at the same time.

Groupon’s commercial in the Super Bowl almost didn’t happen, managing to nab spare airtime only at the last minute, AdAge reports.

It’s banking on the spot to give it a nice bump. For last week, Groupon.com received about half, or 58.5 percent, of all U.S. visits when looking at a category of “group-buying sites.” LivingSocial received 25 percent, reports Experian Hitwise. Total visits for each of them were 5.45 million and 2.33 million, respectively. The Super Bowl viewership is orders of magnitude more. On Sunday, it’s supposed to beat last year’s record of more than 100 million viewers.

Much of Groupon’s publicity before this came from its high-profile business moves, which the company used to its best abilities to attract a mainstream audience. For example, the drama of Groupon’s rejection of Google resulted in at least two high-profile TV appearances for CEO Andrew Mason–the “Today Show” and “Charlie Rose.”

That’s the premise behind Narrative Science, a start-up that sells technology that “generates news stories, industry reports, headlines and more–at scale and without human authoring or editing.”

And the pitch seems to be effective: It’s allowed the company to raise $6 million in a round led by Battery Ventures that closed this week.

The Evanston, Ill.-based company, which started up last year, is led by former DoubleClick executive Stuart Frankel, with Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, two Northwestern University computer science professors. Other investors include Frankel’s former boss David Rosenblatt, who stuck around Google for a bit after it bought the online ad company, and who now advises companies like Twitter, where he sits on the board.

Frankel and Hammond worked on an earlier incarnation of the idea at Northwestern, where they helped produce Stats Monkey, a program that could automatically create passable sports stories based solely on game data. And StatSheet, a North Carolina start-up, wants to use the same premise to fuel a network of sports sites.

But Narrative Science has ambitions bigger than box scores. The company wants to use structured data sets to produce a wide range of stories. Many of which you probably wouldn’t identify as stories (“narrative” is an intentionally broad term), and many of which you’ll never see anyway, because they’re behind a paywall of some sort. Think of financial reports, real estate write-ups, etc.

I suppose some people might get queasy about the idea of robot writers, but I think it makes perfect sense. There’s lots of content-making that machines can and should do much faster than humans, and at least as effectively.

Meanwhile, the push to produce more copy for less has been underway for a long time, even for publishers that don’t get labeled “content farms“–Reuters moved some of its financial-reporting resources to India years ago, and you never hear a peep about that.

The trick for content makers like myself is to find work that only content makers like myself can do–work where human qualities like experience, judgment and creativity get rewarded. And if we can’t do that, we ought to be doing something else, anyway.