PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Super Bowl LVI comes Sunday in Los Angeles. For every TV viewer looking forward to watching the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams battle for football's grandest prize, there is probably somebody that is just as excited to check out the Super Bowl commercials.
NBC has sold 30-second commercials for Sunday’s Super Bowl for as much as $6.5 million. Can that ad really be worth the price tag?
"The return on investment on Super Bowl ads has always been debated, and you can't measure it in traditional ways, because the impact of it can be so great," said Joe Glennon, an associate professor of instruction and chair of the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at Temple University's Luke Klein College of Media and Communication.
"It's going to reach 80 million, 90 million, 100 million people in an instant. And when you have that immediacy and an impact, it's hard to use traditional metrics. I always think it's worth it because there's no better punch for an advertiser."
Audiences for the Super Bowl can sometimes draw about one-third of the entire United States population, and its audience can often be more than double the second-largest audience on TV that year.
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Any advertiser spending upwards of $7 million on a Super Bowl ad realizes that with an audience that size, they get one chance to grab the attention of the viewer who otherwise might be focused on the game, or where the taco dip and their beer might be.
"You have to capture that moment. You have to understand the audience and put something in front of them that's going to resonate," said Glennon.
"That impact can come from noise. You can get a couple A-list talent, like Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen."
"Or you can sort of zig when everyone else is zagging, and you can go on the quiet side," Glennon added.
"If you think back to the Paul Harvey farmer spot from maybe six or eight years ago now, that was just really quiet."
Sometimes, a hit with a Super Bowl ad can launch years of the same messaging to get across your product, like with Snickers and Betty White in 2012.
"Not only was that a great platform for Betty," said Glennon, "it did a great job. It connected. It kicked off a campaign that lasts. It's still ongoing."
However, the competition for attention between those commercial spenders is fierce, with between 50 and 60 ads fighting for a viewer's memory long after the raising of the Lombardi Trophy following the game.
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"I think that at the end of the day, the worst thing you want is to be forgotten, and really, 40 commercials will be forgotten on Tuesday morning," said Glennon.
"It's like any other high-stakes game. There are those that rise the challenge and those that have crumbled."
Listen to the full KYW Newsradio In Depth podcast about Super Bowl ads with Joe Glennon below.