Every year, families and friends gather together to watch the Super Bowl on TV. This year’s Super Bowl LVIII took place on February 11th, with the Kansas City Chiefs beating the San Francisco 49ers. Although the Super Bowl is an event that mainly features football, much of the TV program features more than just the sporting event. Along with the heavily anticipated match, broadcasting channels also incorporate a vast array of advertisements for a variety of companies.
The Super Bowl gets such a high viewership that any advertisement featured in the television program for the event sparks a boom of popularity for its company. Along with the large audience of the Super Bowl, companies have also been hiring popular celebrities to be featured in the advertisements to even further reach the attention of consumers.
Many iconic brands were featured in ads during the 2024 Super Bowl. One of the most notable of these was Verizon, whose advertisement featured Beyonce. Beyonce intended to “break the internet” in this commercial, which resulted in her dropping two new songs during the Super Bowl: “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages.” The Chinese e-commerce company, Temu, was featured very frequently during the program of the game, a total of six times throughout. Makeup brand E.L.F also paid for a feature in the program. Even a trailer for the upcoming film, Wicked, featuring Ariana Grande, was teased during the ad breaks between shots of the game. Although they weren’t the star of the show, the advertisements presented during the Super Bowl were creatively implemented and provided entertainment even when the game wasn’t on– though at what cost?
According to CBS, the cost for brands to be featured as a 30 second Super Bowl ad has risen from 4.5 million in 2019 to 7 million in 2024. Why is the cost so high? Moreover, why would companies even be willing to pay that much for such a short screen time of their products? This is due to the insane amount of consumers that brands are able to reach through a single 30-second feature in the Super Bowl. According to Adobe Analytics and Nielsen Fast National Data, Super Bowl LVIII has become the most watched program ever, with an average of 123.4 million viewers across all platforms. What’s more, many viewers of the Super Bowl are enthusiastic to see these ads and are more likely to act upon the advertisements they see. Sophomore Riya Raj from Macdonald High School, who watched Super Bowl LVIII live, reported that, “I was actually just as excited to watch the ads as I was to watch the game. It’s cool to see the crazy ads that are featured in the Super Bowl every year.”
There’s no better way to increase the effectiveness of an advertisement than having a popular, well-known person featured. Celebrity endorsement of a brand both increases the consumption of that company’s products as well as the popularity and overall awareness of the brand as a whole. For example, Ben Affleck’s feature in the 2023 Dunkin’ Donuts Super Bowl advertisement led to Dunkin’ exploding in popularity just a day later, CNN reports, and Dunkin’ sold more that day than any other day in their history. For playing his part in the advertisement, Affleck was paid a shocking ten million dollars. Though it may seem like a hefty payment for just a few days of shooting and merely a thirty second ad, A-listers such as Affleck are expected to make millions for jobs like these. The perfect marketing opportunity presented by the Super Bowl is worthy of sparing a few pennies (or millions) on celebrity endorsements.
Many viewers tuning in to watch the Super Bowl every year are also interested in seeing what advertisements have been created especially for that program. Companies target this audience, hiring celebrities to be featured in their ads in order to boost the attention towards their products. Although the Super Bowl is a championship football game, brands spend millions of dollars in order for viewers to get even just a thirty second glimpse of their products through their advertisement time slot. The Super Bowl goes beyond simply a football game and even influences consumers throughout the country in half a minute.
