The Magic Behind Super Bowl Ads

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

One night a year on the first Sunday of February, the most anticipated football game of the year is to occur: the Super Bowl. There are many reasons why people watch the Super Bowl: of course, the majority tune in to watch the much-anticipated final game between the two best football teams in the National Football League (NFL), and of course there’s some who stay for the half-time show that features the country’s most favorite singers, but regardless, it is one of the most viewed events in America. Most notably advertisements see about an 880% increase from regular 30 second slot advertisements to 30 second Super Bowl advertisements. Keep in mind that some advertisements are 2 to even 3 minutes. This begs the question: why do companies spend millions of dollars to advertise during the Super Bowl?

According to an article by NBC News, “Super Bowl LVI was viewed by 99.18 million people”; however, the most viewed Super Bowl reached 114.44 million viewers worldwide (Conti 23) which remains the most viewed televised program in history. Now usually, when advertising teams decide the channels to show ads, they do it based on the psychographic segmentation of the audience. Because of this consistent advertising on certain channels, slot costs are fairly low. CNN, for example, sells 30 second ad slots around $5,500 during prime time news shows which falls in between FOX News —- whose ads are about $8,300 —- and MSNBC, at about $3,100 (Katz 17). Since the Super Bowl and other momentous events are cause for a wide potential market, the competition for such slots exponentially increases and therefore prices for such slots also dramatically increases. However, viewership is not the only reason for this insane price value, another reason is the exceeded demand for an extremely limited supply. The Super Bowl takes place on the highest-bidding channel, in this case, FOX News. There is a potential for an infinite number of companies however only 51 advertisements were shown on FOX News, a selective amount. The various sources show that all of the factors shown affect the increasingly costly price that companies face today.

According to KHOU, a branch of CBS in Houston, Texas, Fox reports that all of their 30 second slot times during the Super Bowl were sold out. Now why are these ads so important? In contrast to other major events, advertisements are big points of promotion and are now catching the attention of viewers. Revenues of major companies boost as a result of these advertisements because of such attention from this viewership. Not only this but the legendary, creative skits create an appeal to emotion which results in repeat customers. This main factor creates increased interest from customers and further increases the amount of customers buying from the big corporations that buy these advertisement slots. All of this information shows the magic behind promotion during the Super Bowl and how even a 30 second promotion  on TV could result in long-term wellbeing of a company.