While most viewers will be awaiting the final score of today’s big game, some only care about one thing on Super Bowl Sunday: the commercials.
Often a talking point at the office on Super Bowl Monday, the commercials played during the big game have become ingrained in pop culture. Companies have always prepared their best to drive brand awareness and sales or even just share a message.
But how much money are companies spending on their commercials?
According to Peter Bray, the founder and executive creative director at the ad agency Bray & Co., 30-second spots during Super Bowl LIX are selling for close to $8 million.
He shared with CBS Money Watch that around 51 minutes of advertising has been sold, meaning around $816 million has been spent on the spots alone, not including production costs to create the ads.
Bray says that with the trend from recent years, where Super Bowl commercials have only gotten costlier to broadcast during the game, it won’t be long before total sales for the broadcast reach $1 billion.
“I think in three years, it’s going to hit a billion dollars in ad sales. And that has never before happened on the planet. That is the immensity of this event,” he said.
Even though last year, during Super Bowl LVIII, the artist Ye, formerly Kanye West, played a 30-second video he made from his phone, claiming to have spent all his production money for the commercial on the airtime for it, not every company will stop cutting checks once they get the spot.
According to a report from Fortune, the production costs to make a Super Bowl commercial can range anywhere from $4 million to $10 million, meaning companies are shelling out serious cash to reach consumers.
So why are companies so willing to shell out millions for these funny but sometimes serious commercials?
CNBC reported that according to EDO, an advertising data company, the Super Bowl remains almost three times as effective as the average primetime programming for advertisers.
The company reported that last year, the Super Bowl was 224% more effective than the average primetime programming.
Bray seemed to agree with this, telling CBS News that while traditional TV advertising has fallen less effective, the Super Bowl provides a unique opportunity that makes it worth it for companies to go all out.
“It’s the advertising industry’s Super Bowl as well,” Bray said. “It’s the one time of year where the general public actually cares about advertising, so it’s an exciting time.”
Compound that with the influence of social media, and Bray says it creates a perfect storm.
“It’s actually made advertising in the Super Bowl more relevant than ever because what’s happened is with all these different platforms, it’s very difficult to find a large audience at once,” Bray said. “Someone might advertise as an advertiser on TikTok, or on Instagram ... all of these different advertising opportunities. But you might be duplicating because the audience on TikTok, maybe 90%, are the same audience on Instagram, so there’s a lot of duplication.”
In total, more than 120 million people are expected to tune in to Super Bowl LIX on Sunday. The game will be broadcast on Fox and live-streamed for free on Tubi.