7-30-LVIII
The national spotlight will be firmly on Nevada this weekend, as the Chiefs and the 49ers are set to do battle at one of the biggest sporting — and television — events of the year.
But while the athletes have been working hard in the gym, memorizing plays, and getting their mental game in the right place, marketers have been just as busy. Indeed, in an increasingly fragmented modern media landscape, the Super Bowl remains a rare unifier, drawing hundreds of millions of eyeballs simultaneously to a single event. And, getting in front of those eyeballs remains prohibitively expensive — despite TV viewership slipping from its peak a decade ago.
This year, brands are shelling out $7 million for 30 seconds of airtime, more than 165x the $42,000 that the same slot would have set you back in the first Super Bowl in 1967. Even once you adjust for inflation — which would turn that $42k from 1967 into a $383k expense in 2023 — it’s easy to see that Super Bowl ads have become a cultural spectacle in and of themselves, with a massive 25% of viewers planning to focus more on the ads than the actual game.
Attention please
Interestingly, Kantar estimates that the investment is actually worth it, with every $1 spent on a Super Bowl ad reportedly yielding a return of $4.60 — music to the ears of the producers behind the 70 high-budget commercials that will be airing on game day. With an expected surge in female viewership this year, likely due to Taylor Swift's influence, brands such as Dove, L’Oreal, and e.l.f. are gearing up for their moment in the limelight during the breaks.
