Terry O'Reilly (3:51)
Well, Super Bowl 60 has just wrapped up. A few minutes ago, the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots. They were playing in Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, which is about 50 miles south of San Francisco. That was the second time the super bowl has been played in that stadium as Super Bowl 50 was played there. Let's talk about the cost of super bowl advertising, which is always interesting to me. So as one media buyer said, the super bowl is the only time of the year when viewers don't skip the ads. They actually turn up the volume. And that's the captive attention that brands are paying for. And this year, brands paid $8 million for a 30 second ad. Some of the ad time went for $10 million for 30 seconds. And I'm not quite sure why some advertisers paid $10 million instead of eight. I suspect there were maybe only a couple of spots left and there might have been a bidding war. And it went up to $10 million, which is amazing to me. Now that's not all that advertisers have to pay to be in the super bowl, the production of commercials. You can add another one to $5 million depending on how ambitious the ad was or how many celebrities are in it. Celebrities alone are in the 3 to 5 million dollar range. And when everything is tallied, a single super bowl commercial can be as much as 12 to 20 million dollars as an all in investment. So it is big dollars. And that is a 21,233% increase from the inaugural Super bowl in 1967, when a commercial ad costs just $37,500. Amazing. And Super bowl advertising first crossed the $1 million mark in 1995. Now in Canada, the prices are a bit different. A 30 second Super bowl ad on Canadian TV costs about $197,000 per spot as an average. So while the US spots can exceed 8 million, we're paying under $200,000 for each super bowl spot here in Canada because it is a smaller audience and you don't have to pay as much money to be on the game. Now let's talk audience. So last year, 127.7 million people watched the super bowl, which broke the super bowl all time record, second only to the moon landing for viewership. And that audience rose to 133 million. When Kendrick Lamar did the halftime show, NBC revealed that Bad Bunny's halftime show attracted 135 million viewers. Breaking that record, Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin made surprise appearances with Bad Bunny. And in the wedding scene, that was a real couple really getting married. So the NFL has seen a 10% growth in audience year over year. So their audience is growing. It's multi generational. We're seeing more women than ever before. Over 50% of the audience is female. And that's growing. That might be the Taylor Swift effect at work there. The NFL has a helmets off marketing strategy going on right now. They're trying to humanize their players. So you may have noticed how they introduced the players one by one with pictures and names and hometowns at the start of the Super Bowl. And we saw the players again during certain commercial breaks when they were listing off the sponsors. So they're trying to make it personal, give the game a face, or faces, if you will. And the NFL is doing that because it knows that the super bowl is a quote direct on ramp to lifelong fandom. And it's interesting to note that one of the reasons the game is so addictive in the US in particular, why it's the most watched sport, is in part because of its scarcity. The NFL's core regular season encompasses 17 games played across 18 weeks, compared with 82 games per season for the NBA and NHL and 162 games for major League Baseball. Now, fans certainly don't watch every game. If you are a baseball fan, you're probably not watching 162 games. My wife and I do, but most people don't. But it's the scarcity of football that makes them watch every game, and therefore they become die hard lifelong fans. Let's talk trends in this Super Bowl 60 for a moment. I believe there were 66 national spots available in the game. That means There were 66 commercials. And if you do the math, at $8 million a commercial, that is roughly $528 million in ad time revenue. Now, there's also sponsorship money and all sorts of other revenue sources going on, but the ads brought in $528 million minimum. Now, this year, 40% of the advertisers were new to the Super Bowl. They had never advertised in the super bowl before. There were quite a few AI ads from AI companies this year, which we'll talk about in a moment. There weren't as many junk food ads this year. And junk food is a big part of the super bowl experience. Whereas Health related products and services were increasing and had a bigger presence in the game this year because there's been a cultural move towards health since the pandemic. There were more healthcare ads, five in total, than there were alcohol ads. There were only four alcohol ads in the game. The number of tech brands that advertise doubled since 2022. There were only four auto ads in the super bowl this year, off from a peak of 11 in 2018. And it looks to me that the automakers might be choosing to spend their money at the Olympics and the World cup, which is all happening around the same time, because I think those buys will be cheaper but will also deliver big audiences. The Winter Olympics ad inventory is completely sold out, by the way, and the World cup as of this writing is 90% sold out. So I think a lot of advertisers that were usually in the super bowl spending big money have decided to spend their money elsewhere. There were a lot of celebrity ensembles this year in ads, meaning there were commercials with multiple celebrities in them. There was a Ritz commercial that starred Jon Hamm, Scarlett Johansson and Bowen Yang, for example, which we'll talk about in a few moments last year. It's interesting to note that ads without celebrities outperform celebrity ads on return on investment, which might mean that we've hit celebrity saturation. Finally, there was also less diversity in ads this year, which is interesting because Bad Bunny performed the halftime show. And showing diversity in advertising is of course important because the real risk for brands isn't taking a stand, it's ignoring the reality of the consumer. In other words, diversity is such a big part of an advertiser's target market, so not to reflect them is risk. Here's a little bit of Super Bowl 60 trivia. Each team playing in the Super bowl gets 108 footballs. 54 of those are for practice and 54 are for the actual game. And here's another fun super bowl fact. Typically, 120 balls are used during the actual game. The additional ones are kicker footballs used used for all kicking plays. As a perk, every player in the big game gets a Cadillac to drive around the host city in the week leading up to the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl's halftime is twice as long as it is for a normal game, so that allows the performer to have a nice moment. But it also means that the teams have to stay warmed up inside the locker rooms for the game. They're sitting there longer than usual, which is interesting. Halftime performers do not get paid. Nobody gets paid anything but of course, it's worth tens of millions in exposure. 52.9% of Super bowl viewers across Canada reportedly use food delivery apps such as Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub during the Super Bowl. So a lot of people are not cooking on super bowl day. And here's something I always wondered. NFL officials typically earn $12,000 per game, but during the super bowl, they earn between 30 and $50,000 a game. Interesting. And here's a little trivia that'll make you feel old. Do you remember the wardrobe malfunction? Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson that happened in 2004, 22 years ago? Hard to believe. And it was only last year when a Michelope commercial starred the wonderful Catherine o'. Hara. We miss you already, Catherine. Of course, there were a lot of celebrities in this year's super bowl, as there is every year. Here's a partial list of the celebrities that appeared in ads this year. William Shatner, Ben Stiller, Benson Boone, Peyton Manning, Post Malone, George Clooney, Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Kurt Russell, Spike Lee, Sabrina Carpenter, Serena Williams, Matthew McConaughey, Bradley Cooper, Scarlett Johansson, Sofia Vergara, Olivia Spencer, Adrien Brody, Kendall Jenner, Emma Stone. And on and on and on. It was a long, long list of celebrities. This was kind of the AI Super bowl, in a way. AI companies have spent more than $1.7 billion on AI related advertising this year, and they had a big presence in Super Bowl 60. The Washington Post ran an article this week with the headline, can these super bowl ads make Americans love something they don't like? That's a very interesting headline. So people are excited about AI but scared of it at the same time. So in this super bowl, there was an ad from Google Gemini which showed the AI process helping a mom and her young son imagine a new home they were moving into. ChatGPT had an ad that helped a guy impress his new girlfriend with a menu item he could cook up in his apartment. AI service called Claude took a big swing at the awkwardness of ChatGPT. You know how when you ask ChatGPT something, there's an awkward pause before it answers, like a human. Well, they made a lot of fun of that in that ad. Meta had an AI ad saying that it creates jobs, which is an interesting and weird thing to say because a lot of people fear that AI will take jobs away. And genspark was an AI company that had Matthew Broderick as its spokesperson. And its ad was all about how AI frees workers from Tedious tasks. There was also an alcohol ad for Svedka Vodka that was completely created with AI and you see these kind of crazy looking AI robots dancing to the Rick James song Super Freak. It was the first fully AI generated commercial in super bowl history. There were a couple of weird and outrageous ads, I thought, in the show this year, including one with William Shatner. He's 94 years old, so God bless William Shatner, still working, still in the super bowl, still relevant at 94. So good for him. He was advertising Raisin Bran cereal. So in this ad, he teleports around the United States reminding people to eat fiber rich Raisin Bran to ensure regular trips to the toilet. Now, of course, this is a setup for lots of wordplay using an abbreviated version of Shatner's name. So he becomes Will Shat. So Will Shat in the house, Will Shat on a car, Will Shat every day. I think you get where that was going. So there's old William Shatner making fun of his name, trying to get people to have regular trips to the toilet. Pepsi had an interesting spot. They trolled Coke. So, as you know, Coke has its famous polar bear advertising. Well, in this commercial, a polar bear is blindfolded and he does the taste test. And when he chooses the cola he prefers and takes his blindfold off, it's Pepsi, I want to break free. So the Coke polar bear has chosen. So you see the polar bear going through therapy because he can't believe he's chosen the Pepsi. And it kind of ends on a shot that was a parody of that astronomer incident that I talked about on a show a couple of weeks ago where the CEO and the head of Human resources were caught at a Coldplay concert hugging each other by the kiss cam. This commercial ends with two polar bears being caught on the kiss cam hugging each other, but they're drinking Pepsi. So a little double trolling going on in that ad. The Ritz commercial I mentioned earlier. Last year, they had an ad about having a salty personality with Aubrey Plaza and Michael Shannon, which I thought was funny. They were just proud of being so grumpy. That was the idea. This was an extension of that idea with Jon Hamm, Scarlett Johansson and Bowen Yang. Except this one wasn't funny. I just thought, you know what? It's not funny. The jokes are bad. And I wonder what the celebrities thought when they saw the script for this one. I'm sure they loved the checks for this one, but the script was not good. Don't go away. We'll be right back.
