Welcome to FTW Explains: a guide to catching up on and better understanding stuff going on in the world. Super Bowl commercials are a big deal and come with a big price, and you may be wondering why that is. We’re here to help.
(Editor’s note: We posted this in 2021.)
The annual chatter around Super Bowl commercials can sometimes feel as important as the game itself. In fact, the Super Bowl is probably the one sports broadcast — or maybe any kind of broadcast — where fans actually want to watch the ads instead of tuning them out or changing the channel.
Once they start airing, people love to debate about the best ones, the funniest ones, which ones flopped and which ones should should be replayed all the time. And companies shell out a ton of money for that to happen.
How much does a Super Bowl commercial cost?
For Super Bowl 55, a 30-second, in-game ad on CBS cost about $5.5 million, Variety reported. When you break it down, that comes to about $183,333 per second, which is wild when you think about it.
The 2021 price differs only slightly from the cost of the same thing for the 2020 Super Bowl, which was $5.6 million for 30 seconds during the game, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Why are Super Bowl commercials so expensive?
Simply put, there are a ton of eyeballs on the Super Bowl every year, and advertisers are eager to capitalize.
For the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl 54 win over the San Francisco 49ers last year, FOX — plus FOX Deportes and other digital viewing options — had an average audience of 102.1 million people. When you exclude the digital viewers streaming the game, that average is still 99.9 million, which was a 1 percent increase over Super Bowl 53 and the first year-over-year increase since 2015, per FOX. With an audience of that magnitude, last year’s game was the 10th most-watched Super Bowl of all time and the 11th most-watched telecast ever.
So when advertisers know about 100 million people are tuning in for the big game, they’re willing to pay up to run a Super Bowl commercial and hope it will be the one fans can’t stop talking about the next day.
Even this year without big-time Super Bowl advertisers, like Anheuser-Busch, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, running ads for their flagship brands, as Variety reported, CBS still “virtually sold out” of ad time at the end of January.
Have Super Bowl commercials always been expensive?
Yes, they’ve always been expensive, but the relative price has still skyrocketed.
A 30-second commercial for the first Super Bowl in 1967 between Kansas City and the Green Bay Packers cost between $37,500 and $42,500, Business Insider reported, citing Nielsen Media Research data. With a generally consistent increase in price over the last several decades, the cost of a Super Bowl ad exceeded $1 million by 1994, and by 2017, it was up to $5 million.
