By Colin Heward (Senior Art Director)
A lot has been written about the cost of airing a commercial during the Super Bowl, and for good reason — it’s insanely expensive to advertise!
That’s likely not going to change anytime soon.
But way back in 1967, when the NFL’s Green Bay Packers squared off against the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs in the very first Super Bowl, a 30-second unit went for how much?
Before scrolling down for the answer, take a wild guess:
The answer may surprise you. A 30-second unit for the Super Bowl in 1967 went for $37,500 and $42,500. The first Super Bowl was aired on both the NBC and CBS networks, with NBC being the slightly better bargain. Kind of a trick question.
Now let’s fast-forward to 2017. Everyone knows it’s extremely expensive to run a TV spot during the Super Bowl, to the tune of over $5,000,000.00 for a 30-second spot this year.
If you lost count, I’ll help you out. That’s five MILLION!
That’s a lot of zeros. And that price doesn’t include the cost of actually creating the ad, the publicity around the ad, and other aspects necessary to create a successful Super Bowl ad campaign. In total, a full big game campaign can cost more than $30 MILLION dollars.
Fifty-one years later, the going rate for a Super Bowl spot is 125 times greater than that initial outlay. If you’re a brand advertising this year, you’d better be sure it’s money well spent.
But how do brands improve their odds of justifying such a large ad spend? Two words: digital media.
Companies can promote their ad before and after the game to a large audience, further spreading the effectiveness of their campaigns. Brands can also build digital platforms to promote the ideas behind their company.
Michael Nathanson of the MoffettNathanson research firm points out that getting people to participate with a campaign digitally can also give more insights on potential customers, which is incredibly valuable.
“Most (companies) will want the combination of digital and TV,” he said. “You want to move people to some kind of digital platform for customer acquisition or greater product knowledge. You can use television to drive people to digital.”
But is it worth the five million dollar price tag? To find out, you’ll have to tune in Sunday, February 5 at 6:30pm on FOX — who incidentally wasn’t even around in 1967.
Colin Heward is a Senior Art Director for Wilde Agency. Previously, he discussed “Branding Personalization” and shed some light on “The Many Hidden Meanings In L0G0 Design“, and in the process, he made anyone who never noticed the arrow in the FedEx logo feel like a gigantic doofus.
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