Next Sunday is Super Bowl LV, where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Kansas City Chiefs will battle it out to decide the league champion for the 2020 NFL season. A lot of the usual Super Bowl traditions — big gatherings with lots of friends and family — may not be as easy but one thing remains constant; there will be ads, and they will cost a lot to run.
Peak Super Bowl ads?
This year a 30-second slot is set to cost $5.5 million. For $183,000 per second, you'd expect to be reaching a lot of people with your ad, and you are. Last year almost 100 million people tuned in to watch the Super Bowl live. That's a huge audience but it's actually down from the peak of 2014 when more than 114 million people tuned in.
For some context, Digiday have put together what you could buy for $5.5m in digital media spend. They estimate you could get 275m+ ad impressions on YouTube, 6.1m clicks from Google or 22 weeks of TikTok hashtag challenges with a top influencer. We'll chuck in that you could also sponsor this newsletter exclusively for a really long time (clearly the best option).
The decline in viewership, on linear TV at least, suggests that peak Super Bowl ads might well be behind us.
