标题: 2021.02.05 今年的超级碗广告将看起来有所不同 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-2-14 09:22 标题: 2021.02.05 今年的超级碗广告将看起来有所不同 Daily chart
Super Bowl advertising will look different this year
Big names are forgoing the game, but broadcasters can still expect record returns
Feb 5th 2021
THE STANDS at the Super Bowl on Sunday will look more like those at a pre-season football game than at America’s biggest sporting event. Because of covid-19 restrictions, spectators will fill less than half of the 65,890 seats in the Raymond James Stadium in Florida. Nevertheless, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Kansas City Chiefs could provide the most exciting Super Bowl in years. Tom Brady, the Buccaneers’ quarterback and perhaps the greatest of all time, will face off against Patrick Mahomes, his young opposite number, who is gunning for Mr Brady’s reputation. The Weeknd, a Canadian singer, will make the half-time show as bombastic as ever. And although the stadium will be half-empty, advertising revenue suggests Americans’ interest has never been keener.
The average cost of a 30-second ad during this year’s game is expected to reach $5.6m, according to Kantar, a market-research firm. That is a 7% increase from last year (see chart), and the highest ever. Broadcasters’ in-game advertising revenue reached a record $448.7m last year; there were 46 minutes of ads during the broadcast. CBS, the channel showing this year’s Super Bowl (it shares the honours in rotation with Fox and NBC), may nudge half a billion dollars during the game.
Some Super Bowl viewers pay more attention to the blockbuster ads than the game itself. This year, amid a pandemic-induced recession, the commercial breaks will feel different. In recent years cars and beers have been the most-hawked products (see chart), and the ads have been glossy boasts by brands. Last year’s presidential election also brought expensive political ads, with the campaigns of Mike Bloomberg and Donald Trump each spending around $10m for minute-long slots. Expect more po-faced, pared-back ads and a helping of corporate humility this time around, to match the mood of a nation reeling from the coronavirus.
Brands such as Budweiser, Coke and Hyundai, some of the biggest names at past Super Bowls, are forgoing the event. Budweiser is crowing that it will instead donate money to America’s vaccine effort (although Bud Light, another beer produced by AB InBev, Budweiser’s maker, will feature). Tech companies, boosted by the surge in remote working and virtual socialising during the pandemic, are still spending big. For example Logitech, a Swiss-American maker of webcams and other gadgets, will air its first ever Super Bowl ad, a 60-second production featuring Lil Nas X, an American rapper. And Robinhood, the online broker that infuriated users last week when it suspended trading in shares of GameStop, a struggling seller of video games, hopes to move on from the controversy with an upbeat ad that proclaims “we are all investors”.
On January 27th CBS revealed that it had “virtually sold out” its advertising slots for the game. Last year almost 150m people watched the Super Bowl on Fox, making it the 11th-most watched broadcast in American history. Nine of the ten ahead of it are also Super Bowl games (the other is the finale of “M*A*S*H”, a Korean-war comedy, screened in 1983). The impact of the pandemic on this year’s broadcast will be hard to miss, but the Super Bowl still tops the advertising leagues.
