Super Bowl Advertising Costs $4.5m per 30 Seconds

The annual NFL Championship game between the winners of the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference – better known as the Super Bowl – takes place this weekend and is one of the most bombastic sporting events of the year.

While millions of fans worldwide tune in to watch two of American football’s best teams duke it out for the coveted Vince Lombardi trophy, many more eagerly seek out the annual TV coverage purely for the advertisements shown during the build-up to the game itself and during halftime.

Super Bowl advertisements are as much a yearly tradition as the game itself, creating enormous chatter online, in the press and in living rooms worldwide. In order to take advantage of global fans numbering in the hundreds of millions, advertisers are prepared to spend eye-watering sums to secure the coveted halftime ad spots.

Forbes reports that this year’s Super Bowl between defending champions the Seattle Seahawks and Tom Brady’s New England Patriots demanded fees approaching $4.5 million from advertisers – and that’s for a mere 30 seconds of screen time.

The same publication claims that this figure is 7% greater than last year’s price. While that may sound like an awful lot, it was calculated that last year’s Super Bowl advertisers spent just $3 on every viewer reached. For this year’s advertisers to have enjoyed the same value for money, viewing figures would have to have been in excess of 120 million people – dramatically bucking previous growth trends.

2015’s Super Bowl advertising proves that even the most prestigious marketing slots don’t necessarily represent great value for money. Would this year’s Super Bowl advertisers have been pleased to hear that per-head spend had increased on 2014’s figure, particularly considering the poor reception certain ads received last time around.

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Ian Kirk

Founder at Opportunity Marketing

Ian is the founder of Opportunity Marketing marketing, with over 18 years of experience in successfully setting up marketing departments, creating marketing strategies and implementing these strategies across a wide number of SME companies in both the B2B and B2C sectors through a variety of channels.