The Super Bowl is this Sunday, February 12th, between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs. While audiences will be watching to see who takes home the coveted NFL championship, they will also be watching to determine the winner of another competition – best commercial. This year, the stakes are high with each 30 second ad spot costing 7 million dollars.
With prices so steep, why do companies choose to participate in the Super Bowl commercial madness?
Audience numbers and the power of shared cultural experiences. According to Statista, 99.18 million viewers watched the 2022 Super Bowl — that’s one third of the entire U.S. population! In our increasingly fragmented media landscape, that kind of live viewership is all but extinct, the Super Bowl a unicorn of guaranteed, real-time viewers (and potential customers).
Grand audience numbers aren’t the only benefit here. The keyword is live. Live viewership creates a shared cultural experience, and the power of shared experiences is something we, in experiential marketing, know well. An In Event article about the Super Bowl explains, “At its heart, the Super Bowl is a shared cultural experience. Around 100 million people tune in every year, not only as passive and individual viewers of the sporting action but as part of a collective community. The majority of viewers see the game in a social setting, whether in the form of in-person gatherings or virtual communities.” There is a shared cultural conversation happening before, during and after the game, the shared experience sparking conversations that keep people talking long after the actual event – a successful strategy that we employ in our experiential marketing campaigns.
What would we do with 7 million dollars?
7 million dollars for a 30-second ad spot is a difficult price tag to fathom. Above, we laid out why this is a reasonable price for companies to pay – the sheer volume of viewers and the impact of shared cultural experiences. Objectively, however, 7 million dollars for something that lasts 30 seconds is a wild concept! With that in mind, we asked a few of our Chicago The Musical Dance Mob members what they would do with 7 million dollars.
“I would probably donate to charities and try to produce theatre,” said Katie. Mylan talked about paying off her student loan debt and Grace, through a chuckle, said she would “run a little horse farm.” I would do some combination of their answers in addition to buying a condo.
What would you do with 7 million dollars? I’m sure your answer is probably not “buy a 30-second ad spot,” … unless you work with one of the lucky companies being featured in this year’s Super Bowl commercial lineup because that will most likely turn out to be 7 million dollars on a 30-second ad spot well spent.
Here’s a compilation of the 2023 Super Bowl commercials that have aired so far.
We’ve heard rumors of a Mr. Peanut return and a comeback for the surprisingly polarizing M&M characters, but we’ll just have to wait and see what happens this Sunday as we, together, share the cultural experience that is watching the Super Bowl.
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