Super Bowl LVIII is less than a week away, and with it, the biggest event on the American media calendar. With more than 100 million viewers every year, $7 million spent on each 30 second commercial and the cheapest tickets still likely to burn an $8000 hole in your wallet—before you even factor in plane ticket, food and hotel room costs—the Super Bowl is a gold mine for all the businesses involved.
Here’s a look at what makes the Super Bowl worth so much money, and why companies are willing to shell out the big bucks in order to take part.
All About Advertising
With those commercial spot numbers in mind, it makes sense to begin by talking about how advertisements impact the success of TV and streaming services during the Super Bowl. Networks don’t have to pay extra to broadcast the big game: it’s part and parcel of their already-established TV rights deals with the NFL, which amount to roughly $1 billion per network, per year and pays for each game that is broadcast, no matter if it’s preseason, a special like Sunday Night Football, or the biggest fish like playoff games and the Super Bowl.
The big game lasts for roughly four hours, longer than a typical NFL game because of the extra time saved for commercials and the extended halftime shows: roughly 50 minutes of airtime are devoted to commercials, meaning somewhere between 70 and 100 spots aired.
That adds up to between $500 million and $700 million in commercial revenue, without even taking the pregame and postgame commercials into account: those don’t cost as much, but they still add another four to five hours of airtime to the broadcast. In 2009, they cost $1 million per 30 second spot, and that number is sure to have grown significantly over the past 15 years.
Part of the Spectacle
Super Bowl commercials have become so popular that they even draw an audience outside of the typical football fan: plenty of people claim that they only watch the game to see the commercials, so it makes sense that advertisers want to pull out all the stops in creating a commercial that viewers will remember for years to come.
One of the most interesting things about Super Bowl commercials is the way that they help tell the story of popular culture in the United States. If you go back and watch the commercials from a given year—the vast majority of them are available on YouTube, for instance—you’ll have an interesting window into what was going on at that time.
Super Bowl LIII in 2019 had iconic commercials hyping up the final season of Game of Thrones, while viewers during Super Bowl LVI became inundated in advertisements for cryptocurrency and NFTs as Bitcoin took the world by storm.
This year, you can expect to see plenty of advertisements for sportsbooks, because sports betting is one of the most popular pastimes among fans of the NFL these days. Whether it’s the Super Bowl 2024 or what color of Gatorade the winning coach will be doused with, you can be sure that you’ll hear plenty about the various betting apps during the biggest gambling event of the year.
Streaming Model Switches Things Up
For decades, the Super Bowl broadcasting format has remained unchanged. Major networks like Fox, CBS, NBC and, occasionally, ABC or ESPN get the broadcasting rights on a rotating basis, and the big game brings in nearly $1 billion in revenue from commercial sales alone.
We’re starting to see that trend change, though, as those networks no longer have a monopoly on broadcasting the game.
NBC is starting to grab a bigger chunk of the pie, airing the game on Peacock, their subscription based service. Paramount, meanwhile, is starting to get in on the action as well, as they broadcast the game on Nickelodeon in order to appeal to younger demographics, with cartoon characters like Patrick Star and Dora the Explorer detailing the action alongside typical hosts like Nate Burleson.
It’ll be interesting to see how long this new business model lasts for, or if it will flame out as time goes on.
At first, it likely means more money for the NFL as more networks are paying for the right to broadcast… but the networks might end up paying less for those rights because they aren’t exclusive anymore. Similarly, we may see the average commercial price begin to decrease because advertisers aren’t getting to show their brand to all the viewers, having a limited selection of those watching a given network to advertise to.