Super Bowl Commercials Jump to Record Prices
By Movieguide® Contributor
Fox. Corp sold commercial slots for Super Bowl LIX at a record price of over $8 million each.
The Super Bowl “is the only place where you can aggregate legitimate scale with one commercial,” said Mark Evans, executive VP of sales at Fox Sports. “It’s not like any other thing.”
It wasn’t always like this. Near the end of the last decade, advertisers had the upper hand, and sometimes slots didn’t sell until days before the Bowl, per Variety. The NFL had secured deals with CBS and then NBC for THURSDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL. This meant advertisers could have cheaper and more frequent commercial time during football season.
Thanks to streaming, it doesn’t quite work like that anymore. Evans says many advertisers are shifting money that they formerly would have spent on primetime commercial slots into sports.
“The NFL has benefitted from that,” Evans said.
In August, Fox sold 2025 Super Bowl 30-second slots at the price of $7 million. Fox CEO announced in its third quarter that slots sold out. However, the California fires allowed for more slots to open. Some companies, including State Farm, asked to be released from their deals to help with the fires, and Fox resold their slots at higher prices.
Even pre-game coverage slots have upticked. For 30 seconds of ad time, pre-game slots have sold at $4.5 million. In the past, it was $2 million. Post-game coverage ads have sold at $4 million.
The 2023 Super Bowl Telecast made $600 million in ad revenue. The game itself had 123.7 million viewers.
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The NFL decides how many commercial breaks the Bowl will have. It added five more “floating” breaks which will only appear if a player gets injured or if there is another halt in the game. Fox and the NFL would share revenue from the floating breaks.
The NFL’s VP of broadcast planning says the breaks let “you take advantage of downtime. If you’re lucky, you get to the fourth quarter and maybe eight minutes in the late game, and the only break is if it’s the two-minute warning. Now we can just play football and let the game continue with rapid-fire action and excitement.”
“What was unique to this Super Bowl, or this marketplace, was we had a lot more people that weren’t in the game at all, all of a sudden be like, no, no, I have to get in the game,” Evans told Sports Business Journal.
A few of the advertisers paying millions for slots are Anheuser-Busch InBev, PepsiCo, Ferrara Candy Co.’s Nerds, Meta, Georgia-Pacific’s Angel Soft, Squarespace, Kellanova and Stellantis. Evans says this year will see less from automobile companies, movie studios and streamers than previous years.
Next year, NBCUniversal will host the Super Bowl and is expected to have packages that include the Winter Olympics, the NBA All-Star Game and “the football spectacular.”
“I don’t see it slowing down anytime soon,” Evans said.
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