Winter may be cold, but the Super Bowl game always pumps up the heat! 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 a mere $7 million (yes, $7 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 $8 million on a single day.
Love them or hate them, Super Bowl advertisements have become a talking point before, during, and after the game. More than 50 brands took out ads designed to help them stand out to consumers, some with high-profile athletes and celebrities such as Serena Williams, Scarlett Johansson, Zendaya, Anna Kendrick, and Mattel’s Barbie. Happily, the E*Trade baby also returned to the game after many years away!
Cryptocurrencies took several ads, with Coinbase using a simple, floating QR code that linked viewers to a site where they could get $15 of free bitcoin. Some brands even focused on their competitors, with Swedish EV manufacturer Polestar taking on Tesla with its simple ad.
This year an audience of 112.3 million adults in the U.S. tuned in to watch the Los Angeles Rams beat the Cincinnati Bengals 23-20. The audience increased 16% over last year, including 99.2 million viewers on NBC, 1.9 million viewers on Telemundo (the first Spanish language network to show Super Bowl), and 11.2 million on streaming platforms.
More numbers:
- Reach of 167 million viewers.
- Expanded 17-game regular season schedule.
- 103.4 million viewers of Pepsi halftime show.
- $7.6 billion in gambling bets.
- 1.42 billion chicken wings to be consumed during the game.
- 67 million points of avocados to be consumed during the game.
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Which ad is your favorite this year?
Group Activities and Discussion Questions:
- Bring up one of the Web sites that have all the Super Bowl ads: https://www.ispot.tv/events/2022-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; NBC; iSpot.tv; Nielsen Research; NY Post; other news sources
