Is A 30-Second Ad Spot During The Super Bowl Worth US$?8M?!

The Super Bowl just happened this past Sunday in the US. The annual event is the biggest live sports event in North America with a reported 126M predominantly American viewers tuning in this time around. On this basis alone, something in the region of 80 30-second ad spots ran during this year’s Super Bowl with each spot being sold for an astronomical US$ 8M and netting a gargantuan total of US$ 640M in the process for Fox Sports and the National Football League, also known as the NFL. Not bad for one day of work!

In many marketing circles globally, when a brand is able to fork out US$ 8M for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl, it means that, in no uncertain terms, they have arrived! This is the one moment every year when the majority of Americans, young and old, are glued to all of the their digital screens, large and small, to watch the United States biggest sporting event, hands down! It does not get more ‘Americana’ than the Super Bowl as far as live sports events go.

It is from this very perspective that brands of all kinds, from new and sexy challengers to well established legacy behemoths willingly fork over millions of hard earned or ‘raised’ dollars to be seen and heard across every part of the gold old U.S. of A! This one move has seen unknown brands go from obscurity to register record breaking revenues as well as older brands finding new ways to refresh their emotional resonance at scale on the back of cleverly created ad spot. In just 30 seconds, a brand’s fortunes can be made or lost during the Super Bowl! To many brands, having an ad spot during the Super Bowl is worth every penny.

However, there’s a rub to it. You see, the Super Bowl is an annual live sports event that draws a predominantly American audience who care and love it for the game but also for the entertainment extravaganza that it also happens to be. I have personally never watched a single Super Bowl but I can assure you that I look forward to seeing many of the super creative ad spots that are fashioned by a myriad of ad agencies to get as many eyeballs as possible to see, and hopefully, fall in love with a brand. In many instances, the brands in question are largely endemic to the North American market and many are not even sold or relevant outside the U.S.

So, all things considered, if your brand is relevant to the U.S and/or North American market, by all means, if you have the stomach for it, book an ad spot for next year’s Super Bowl if you can stomach the coin needed to gain entry. Once that is done, make sure you also create an ad spot that is actually creative and memorable that will actually get tongues wagging, eyeballs ogling, and wallets opening. This in itself can cost significantly more than the ad spot itself so serious conviction is required should you consider making the leap and maybe, just maybe, score a massive touch down.

On the flip side, the rest of the world knows that the Super Bowl is nowhere nearly as the big as the FIFA World Cup which happens every four years. The final game of the 2022 edition of FIFA World Cup had an audience of 1.5B globally. This clearly dwarfs the Super Bowl from a live sports perspective by factor of almost 12 times! That being said, a fairer comparison would be the UEFA Champions League final which is also an annual live sports event that attracts an audience of 400M which is more than 3 times what the Super Bowl gets each year. However, from socio-economic perspective, the US audience is probably the most attractive in terms of their return on ad spend.

In concluding, for the all the fanfare and hype around the Super Bowl, one thing we can say with honesty is that it has led to some of the most creative and quite frankly audacious entertainment and advertising moments that quite often can ignite or reignite the trajectories of brands and musicians alike. This has quite often seen the rest of the world equally entertained by the ad spots and the half time shows at the Super Bowl even if none of them ever care to watch the actual game. In the final analysis, if you ask anyone in marketing if a 30-Second US$ 8M ad spot at the Super Bowl is worth it they will almost certainly tell you to just do it!