This Year’s Super Bowl and all that Sports Advertising
Super Bowl XLIX with all its excitement is finally over. For the Patriots it will have been considered a success. For the Seahawks it could have been another success except for a rather embarrassing call in the last minute which deprived the team of victory.
But what about the advertisers and all their sports advertisements? Was Super Bowl XLIX a success for them? It is probably far too early for them to have calculated their ROI for this year’s event. However, having agreed to pay millions of dollars for a 30 second advertising slot, we expect that they had already worked out their expected financial gains on the investment.
To place a sports advertisement on network television during the Super Bowl is a costly affair. This year NBC charged in the region of $4,500,000 per 30 second slot during the Super Bowl game, compared with the $1,085,000 that the same network charge twenty years ago. To be able to charge that amount of money for sports advertisements is quite amazing. It clearly demonstrates the value that the big corporate companies believe they get when their sports advertisement is shown during a major event.
In fact the hype that surrounds the sports advertisements that are to be shown during the Super Bowl is not much less than the hype that precedes the game. It is almost like the Super Bowl for sports advertising, except that the games that are played before the “Sports Advertising Super Bowl” are propaganda for publicity. There are no playoffs either; just a big fat cheque is all you need to be in the final.
As a result of all the speculation and intrigue, the country waits in anticipation to see whose sports advertisement will be the best, nearly as much as they do to see who will win the Super Bowl itself.
The advertisers are playing a good game. They have you hooked even before kick-off, but they pay a hefty price to do so.