Super Bowl commercials
Super Bowl commercials, colloquially known as Super Bowl ads, are high-profile television commercials featured in the U.S. television broadcast of the Super Bowl, the championship game of the National Football League (NFL). Super Bowl commercials have become a cultural phenomenon of their own alongside the game itself, as many viewers only watch the game to see the commercials.[3] Many Super Bowl advertisements have become well known because of their cinematographic quality, unpredictability, surreal humor, and use of special effects. The use of celebrity cameos has also been common in Super Bowl ads. Some commercials airing during, or proposed to air during the game, have also attracted controversy due to the nature of their content.
The phenomenon of Super Bowl commercials is a result of the game's extremely high viewership and wide demographic reach. Super Bowl games have frequently been among the United States' most-watched television broadcasts, with Nielsen having estimated that Super Bowl XLIX in 2015 had an average viewership of 114.4 million viewers in the United States, surpassing the previous year's Super Bowl as the most-watched television broadcast in U.S. history.[4] As such, advertisers have typically used commercials during the Super Bowl as a means of building awareness for their products and services among this wide audience, while also trying to generate buzz around the ads themselves so they may receive additional exposure, such as becoming a viral video. National surveys (such as the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter) judge which advertisement carried the best viewer response, and CBS has aired annual specials chronicling notable commercials from the game. Several major brands, including Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Doritos, GoDaddy, Master Lock, and Tide have been well known for making repeated appearances during the Super Bowl.
The prominence of airing a commercial during the Super Bowl has carried an increasingly high price. The average cost of a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl increased from $37,500 at Super Bowl I to around $2.2 million at Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000. By Super Bowl XLIX in 2015, the cost had doubled to around $4.5 million, and by Super Bowl LVI in 2022, the cost had reached up to $7 million for a 30-second slot.
Super Bowl commercials are largely limited to the United States' broadcast of the game. Complaints about the inability to view the ads are prevalent in Canada, where federal "simsub" regulations require pay television providers to replace feeds of programs from U.S. broadcast stations with domestic feeds if they are being broadcast at the same time as a Canadian broadcast station. In 2016, the CRTC, Canada's telecom regulator, enacted a policy from 2017 to 2019 to forbid the use of simsub during the Super Bowl, citing viewer complaints and a belief that these ads were an "integral part" of the game; Super Bowl LI was the first game to fall under this policy. The NFL's Canadian rightsholder Bell Media challenged the policy at the federal appeals court, arguing that it violated the Broadcasting Act by singling out a specific program for regulation and devalued its broadcast rights to the game. While the appeals court sided with the CRTC, the Supreme Court of Canada overturned the ruling in December 2019 as a violation of the Broadcasting Act.[5]
Cost[edit]
Owing to the large potential audience, the network broadcasting the Super Bowl can also charge a premium on advertising time during the game. A thirty-second commercial at Super Bowl I in 1967 cost $37,500.[21] By contrast, Super Bowl XLVI set what was then a record for the price of a Super Bowl advertisement, selling 58 spots (including those longer than 30 seconds) during the game, generating $75 million for NBC; the most expensive advertisement sold for $5.84 million.[22] Super Bowl XLVII and Super Bowl XLVIII both set the average cost of a 30-second commercial at $4 million.[10][23] Super Bowl XLIX, also broadcast by NBC, surpassed that record with a base price of $4.5 million.[24]
Media executives projected that the cost of a 30-second commercial could exceed $5 million at Super Bowl 50,[25] a figure that CBS confirmed.[26] That price would serve as a plateau for all three Super Bowls held since then; Fox would match that figure for Super Bowl LI,[27] NBC would slightly exceed for Super Bowl LII[28] with a $5.2 million price tag,[29] and CBS would slightly increase that to $5.25 million for Super Bowl LIII.[29][30] Super Bowl LI would also, for the first time in the game's history, feature overtime play; four ads were broadcast between the end of regulation and the start of play, including two ads seen earlier in the game, and two ads that were sold for and also seen during the post-game show. While Fox had negotiated ad sales for overtime in the event it was to occur, it is unknown whether the network charged a premium on top of the base cost.[31] In comparison, Sunday Night Football, the flagship primetime game during the regular season, had an average cost of around $700,000 for 30 seconds of time in 2017.[32]
The average cost of a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl increased by 87% between 2008 and 2016,[33] before stabilizing since then.[34] Slightly fewer spots were sold for Super Bowl LIII than the previous game, leading to a noted increase in the number of ads aired for network programming (from CBS and CBS All Access in this case) in comparison.[35] Fox was reported to have charged around $5 to $5.6 million for 30 seconds of commercial time at Super Bowl LIV.[36] CBS kept the price steady at around $5.5 million for Super Bowl LV in 2021.[37]
As the 2018 Winter Olympics marked the first time since 1992 that the Winter Olympics and Super Bowl were shown by the same network in a single year, NBC offered advertisers the opportunity to purchase packages of time for their ads covering both Super Bowl LII and the Olympics. NBC stated that doing so would allow advertisers to amortize their expenses through additional airplay during the Olympics.[38] To prevent the 2022 Winter Olympics from cannibalizing advertising revenue and viewership for Super Bowl LVI, CBS agreed to exchange the game to NBC for Super Bowl LV in 2021.[39][40] NBC subsequently charged between $6.5 and 7 million for a 30-second commercial,[41] with Fox and CBS holding steady for 2023 and 2024 respectively.[42]
The high cost of purchasing advertising time, on top of the cost of producing the commercial itself, has led to concerns by marketers that the increased sales that can result from a Super Bowl commercial do not recoup the cost of buying the ad time. In the early 2010s, advertisers such as Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, General Motors, and Pepsi chose to skip the Super Bowl due to the high costs of advertising—although Pepsi would return in 2013, followed by GM in 2014. As a lower-cost alternative, some advertisers have elected to purchase advertising time during the games' extended pre-game shows (which, during Super Bowl XLVIII, ranged from $100,000 to $2 million), or from individual network affiliates that are broadcasting it.[10][43][44]
With the introduction of simulcasting across multiple networks for Super Bowl LVIII, CBS simulcast most of the game's commercials on its Nickelodeon children's simulcast of the game. As some of the advertisers involved adult-only products such as beer and gambling, Nickelodeon sold separate advertisements as replacements, each selling for up to $300,000 per advertisement, compared to $7,000,000 per advertisement for the main broadcast.[45][46]
Local advertising during the Super Bowl[edit]
To dodge the high costs of obtaining national ad time, or to broadcast more regionalized campaigns, some advertisers elect to purchase local advertising time from the individual network affiliates airing the Super Bowl, such as the Church of Scientology—who bought local ad time in major urban markets such as New York City in 2014, and the Bank of Montreal to promote its BMO Harris Bank branches.[149][150] In 2024, the Scientology ad was listed 9th in the top 10 most watched Super Bowl 2024 ads by Variety, just above the Skechers commercial.[151] In 2012, Old Milwaukee broadcast a Super Bowl ad starring Will Ferrell; as an extension of the beer's regional campaign with the actor, the ad only aired in the city of North Platte, Nebraska.[152]
Several notable local ads were broadcast during Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014. The Utah Department of Transportation used the game to broadcast a public service announcement on seat belt usage for its Zero Fatalities campaign, which featured a depiction of a child who had died in a rollover crash because he did not use a seat belt.[153] In Savannah, Georgia, local personal injury lawyer Jamie Casino broadcast a two-minute-long advertisement on WTGS, which featured a thriller-styled retelling of how he stopped representing "cold-hearted villains" to avenge the 2012 Labor Day shooting death of his brother Michael Biancosino, and Emily Pickels, after a subsequent statement by former police chief Willie Lovett who claimed that there were "no innocent victims," culminating with Casino digging through a grave with a sledgehammer.[154][155] The commercial went viral after the game, with The Independent dubbing it the "most metal" Super Bowl ad imaginable.[156][157] Tribune Broadcasting used local time on the Fox affiliates it owned to air an extended promo for Salem, a then-upcoming series on sister cable network WGN America.[158]
In 2015, Newcastle Brown Ale bought time on local NBC stations to air an ad that, as a commentary on the high cost of national Super Bowl advertising time, contained plugs for 37 other products and companies it had recruited in a crowdfunding campaign.[159][160] In Savannah, Georgia, Jamie Casino aired a sequel to his 2014 ad that focused on the "bullies" that he had encountered throughout his life.[161]
St. Louis attorney Terry Crouppen aired a local ad in 2016 in which he criticized Stan Kroenke for his decision to re-locate the St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles.[162][163]
Some Canadian companies bought local advertising time from Fox affiliates carried in the country in 2017, taking advantage of a new regulatory policy that made the Super Bowl available directly from U.S. stations via local television providers for the first time.[164]
In 2018, rock musician Alice Cooper appeared in a local ad for Desert Financial Credit Union, which played upon his band's song "School's Out" to promote its re-branding from Desert Schools Federal Credit Union.[165][166] Jamie Casino also returned with a new ad.[167] A local Subaru dealer in Muskegon, Michigan ran a simplistic ad containing only the logos of the dealership, and the message "Congratulations Patriots!"—a "last minute calculated risk" based on odds favoring the team, given that the game was actually won by the Philadelphia Eagles.[168]