The Super Bowl of marketing

The Future. The Super Bowl is not only the biggest sporting event in the country, but it’s also the biggest marketing event, with competition over who has the best ad as fierce as any team rivalry. With Usher headlining the Halftime Show and Taylor Swift making general headlines, a record number of female viewers will likely power this Sunday’s game to record ratings… for both the game and the ads.

Focus group
Paramount Global is giving brands plenty of opportunities to get their Super Bowl spotlight.

• The entertainment conglomerate has sold out of its broadcast inventory on CBS, which hit a record price of $7 million for a 30-second spot.
• But for brands who couldn’t cough up that much, they were able to buy inventory during the stream on Paramount+, the slime-filled coverage on Nickelodeon, and the Spanish-language broadcast on TelevisaUnivision.
• To compete for virality, brands have spared no expense in recruiting famous faces for ads, with celebrity-starring commercials accounting for two-thirds of ads last year (up from less than a third in 2010).
• And with TSwift making an appearance and somehow juicing ratings even more, female-skewing brands have gotten into the fray — Dove bought its first ad space in 18 years and e.l.f. Cosmetics did so for the first time ever.

Everyone wants a piece of the 115.1 million viewers who watched the game last year — the largest audience for a TV event ever.