Winter may be cold, but the Super Bowl heats us up! The Super Bowl has become one of the premier venues for marketers. The thrills, the chills, the excitement and surprises – and that’s just the advertisements! At a cost of roughly $5.6 million for 30 seconds of air time, the Super Bowl is also the most expensive advertising placement of any event or show. Add to the air time the costs of designing and producing ads, plus the integration into other marketing tactics, and a company can easily spend upwards of $6 million on a single day.
Love them or hate them, Super Bowl advertisements have become a talking point during and after the game. It’s a big stage, and can also be a big risk. This year it had an audience of 102 million adults in the U.S. across multiple platforms. And viewers are far from passive, generating $17 billion in purchases on food, team gear, TVs and more.
All this generated roughly $435 million in advertising revenue, up 20% from 2019. Who were the top spenders?
- Anheuser-Busch: $41 million
- Pepsi Co: $31 million
- Proctor & Gamble: $30 million
- Amazon: $26 million
- Hyundai: $20 million.
Top categories for ads included automotive, food, financial services, and technology.
Watch the ads – which ad is your favorite?
Group Activities and Discussion Questions:
- Bring up one of the Web sites that have all the Super Bowl ads: https://www.ispot.tv/events/2020-super-bowl-commercials
- Divide students into teams. Have each team select a Super Bowl ad to analyze and present in class.
- What is the target market, key message, and offer from the ad?
- How does the ad integrate with a company’s other advertisements?
- Are the messages integrated with a company’s Web site and social media?
- As a class, after each commercial have students assign one to five stars for the advertisements. Which advertisement won the class vote?
Source: Ad Week, CBS, iSpot.tv, Nielsen, other news sources
