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The Super Bowl is no longer just about football — or even sports betting. For many viewers, the championship game has become a showcase for advertising, entertainment and pop culture, with commercials now commanding as much attention as the action on the field.
Sports fans likely remember Super Bowl LVI as the game in which Joe Burrow and the Cincinnati Bengals were one play away from beating Matthew Stafford and the Los Angeles Rams. Ad executives remember the game for a different reason.
Super Bowl LVI marked the first time in the game’s history that viewers were more interested in the commercials than the halftime show. It was a landmark moment for the advertising industry, and the numbers bear that out.
“Being a part of the Super Bowl commercial inventory for many brands is an opportunity to build brand awareness and recall, in addition to raising sales figures, AI-native marketing data and analytics company Kantar noted in a 2023 article.
Super Bowl ad spend delivers outsized ROI
One of the best ways to understand the return a Super Bowl commercial brings to a brand is to measure how much money a brand earned for every dollar it spent on an ad during the Big Game.
Kantar found that brands earned $2.70 for every $1 they spent on the 2020 Super Bowl. The following year, that figure shot up to $4.60, followed by $4.50 in 2022 and a record-breaking $5.20 in 2023.
Super Bowl ads are so lucrative and influential that Kantar estimates one Super Bowl spot is 20 times as impactful as a regular commercial.
All that data translates to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. In 2021, for example, brands spent a total of $435 million on ads, according to Kantar. With brands earning $4.60 for every dollar spent, the 2021 game generated more than $1.6 billion in revenue for advertisers.
What makes a Super Bowl ad actually work
The formula for picking the right commercial isn’t always the same from year to year, making it tricky for brands to consistently score big with viewers. In 2022, ads featuring celebrities generated more revenue than those without stars.
However, that trend flipped the following year, with non-celebrity ads earning $5.3 million per spot versus 5.1 million for celebrity ads. In 2024, the gap widened further to $9.4 million versus $6.7 million, according to Kantar.
What’s ahead for this year’s Super Bowl ad lineup? Kantar projects that four themes will resonate with viewers:
- Challenging the status quo
- Harnessing the hype around AI
- Relying on creative storytelling more than celebrity clout
- Original humor that gives viewers a break from the heaviness of life
As for how much brands are willing to spend to showcase their creativity during the Super Bowl, Bloomberg reported that the average spend remains the same as last year — $8 million — but, for the first time, ad slots have sold for $10 million.
