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TLDR;
Super Bowl ads look absurdly expensive at $7–8M for 30 seconds, but the data tells a different story. When you factor in audience scale, attention quality, cultural impact, and measurable downstream performance, the Super Bowl can be one of the most efficient media buys for brands ready to scale.
On February 9, 2025, somewhere in the Fox broadcast compound at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, a clock ticked past zero on a thirty-second window of airtime. It was one of sixty-three such windows scattered throughout the evening, each one costing its buyer between seven and eight million dollars. By the time the Philadelphia Eagles hoisted the Lombardi Trophy that night, Fox had collected north of $600 million in advertising revenue from a single broadcast — more than the annual GDP of a dozen countries.
And the advertisers? They’d spent that money to reach a television audience of 127.7 million people, the largest in American broadcasting history. A number that, in an era when a hit primetime show draws eight million viewers and a viral TikTok might reach fifty million over a week, borders on the absurd.
This is the economics of Super Bowl advertising in 2026: a market where thirty seconds of airtime costs more than most Americans will earn in a lifetime, where the all-in cost of a single commercial can exceed $50 million, and where the fundamental question — is it actually worth it? — has never been more urgent or more answerable.
The answer, it turns out, depends entirely on what you mean by “worth it.” And the math is more interesting than the sticker shock suggests.
The Full Price of Admission
The number that dominates every pre-Super Bowl news cycle — this year, it’s $8 million for a 30-second spot on NBC — is, in the language of military strategists, a known known. What’s less understood is that it represents roughly half the actual cost of showing up.
“The all-in cost for a Super Bowl commercial is $10 million to $12 million on the low end, and $20 million-plus on the high end,” the Hollywood Reporter reported in February 2025, and that was before NBC pushed the average rate card another million dollars north. CNN’s reporting from 2024 put the ceiling even higher: “Brands can spend between $15 million and $50 million for a single Super Bowl commercial, with $10 to $15 million spent on talent alone.”
The airtime buy is just the tip of the iceberg. Below the waterline lies a cost structure that would make a Hollywood studio blush:
Component | Typical Range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Airtime (30 seconds) | $7–8M | The base media buy for 2025–2026 |
Production | $1–5M | Filming, VFX, editing, music licensing |
Celebrity talent | $1–10M+ | Varies wildly by star power |
Agency fees | $500K–2M | Creative development and strategy |
Social/digital amplification | $1–5M | Teasers, influencer seeding, paid social |
PR & earned media | $500K–2M | Press strategy, events, activations |
For the New York Times’ reporting on Super Bowl LI in 2017, companies spent between 25% and 100% of their airtime cost on additional marketing tied to the ad’s promotion. Applied to 2026 pricing, that means a brand buying an $8 million spot should budget $10 million to $16 million in total, at minimum.
Some brands spend far more. When Dunkin’ enlisted Ben Affleck for their 2023 Super Bowl campaign, the celebrity fee alone was approximately $10 million, according to CNN, citing three sources with knowledge of the deal. Affleck also helped conceive and direct through his production company, Artists Equity. When Hims & Hers disclosed their 2026 Super Bowl investment to Inc. magazine, the number was $16 million for a single ad — nearly a year of production effort, produced in-house with a voiceover by Common.
At the extreme end, a brand running a 60-second spot with multiple A-list celebrities and a full multi-week campaign can clear $50 million. Forbes noted that 90-second Super Bowl commercials carry a price tag around $20 million in airtime alone.
And the price, like everything else in this economy, only goes in one direction. In 1967, the first Super Bowl charged $37,500 for thirty seconds. By 1995, it crossed $1 million. By 2017, $5 million. NBC’s Mike Marshall confirmed in January 2026 that “a handful” of this year’s spots sold for north of $10 million — the first time any Super Bowl ad has crossed that threshold. Sports Business Journal is already speculating about when the average rate card hits $10 million, and the smart money says 2028.
The trajectory is almost perfectly exponential: a 281% increase from 2000 to 2026, with the last six years alone accounting for a 43% climb. At $8 million for 30 seconds, the math works out to $266,666 per second of airtime. At premium placement rates, it’s $333,333.
Danny Winer, CEO of HexClad, the DTC cookware brand that made its Super Bowl debut in 2025 alongside Gordon Ramsay and Pete Davidson, put it with characteristic understatement: “To pay for this, I’ve got to start driving Ubers on the weekend, it’s so expensive.”
So why does anyone pay it?
The Last Campfire
To understand why brands keep writing these checks — and why the checks keep getting bigger — you have to understand what’s happened to every other mass-audience event in American media.
The Oscars drew 32.9 million viewers in 2017. By 2024, that number had dropped to 19.5 million — a 41% decline. The Grammys fell from 26 million to 15.4 million over the same period. The NBA Finals averages 12 to 18 million per game. The World Series, roughly the same. A hit broadcast sitcom is lucky to crack 8 million.
The Super Bowl, meanwhile, went the other direction. From its pandemic-era trough of 95.2 million in 2021, it climbed to 115.1 million in 2023, then 123.7 million in 2024, then an all-time record of 127.7 million in 2025. Three consecutive years of record-breaking viewership — accomplished during the peak of cord-cutting, when traditional pay-TV lost roughly a quarter of its subscriber base.
The 2025 broadcast captured a household share of 83%. That means of every American with a television turned on during the Super Bowl, more than eight out of ten were watching the game. The adults 25–54 rating of 42.8 set a new demographic record. Peak viewership during the second quarter hit 137.7 million. Total reach across all platforms — broadcast, streaming, Spanish-language simulcast — was 191.1 million unique viewers.
No other media event in the Western world produces numbers in the same area code.
“Where else can you get 100 million viewers at once?” asked Amy Leifer, DirecTV’s chief advertising sales officer, in a February 2025 CNBC interview. “Especially in this fragmented landscape… there’s virtually few places you can go to get that type of scale.”
She’s not wrong. The Super Bowl is the last campfire around which the entire culture gathers — not out of obligation, but out of genuine desire. And unlike virtually every other form of television, the audience doesn’t just tolerate the advertising. They come for it.
This is the statistic that separates the Super Bowl from every other media buy on earth: according to Statista, 43% of American viewers say they tune in specifically to watch the commercials. A Harris Poll survey from 2023 found that 75% of planned viewers said they were “excited for the ads.” YouGov data from 2024 pegged 14% of the audience — roughly 17 million people at Super Bowl scale — as watching primarily for the advertising.
Fourteen percent might sound small until you realize it represents more viewers than the Grammys attract in total.
“It’s well beyond the hardcore Xs-and-Os football fans that are tuning in, now more than ever,” noted Sarah Bolton, EVP of business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions. “With one of the Kelces specifically and somebody in one of those skyboxes specifically, people are looking for those reaction shots and then the online reaction to the reaction shots.”
The result is a media environment that is, quite literally, the inverse of normal television. Regular TV: DVR ad-skipping rates run 50–60% on recorded content. Streaming pre-roll: skip rates of 65–80% when available. The Super Bowl? Virtually zero. TVision, which maintains the industry’s largest passive in-home attention measurement panel, has documented that during the Super Bowl, ads actually score higher attention than the game itself — an attention proportion of 114.0 for ads versus 112.1 for the game programming.
Read that again: people pay more attention to the commercials than to the football.
“When it comes to this particular thing, we are holding on hard and fast,” said Shoshana Winter, CEO of Converge, speaking to CNBC about the Super Bowl being the last truly captive broadcast audience.
The Math Nobody Does (But Should)
The sticker shock of $8 million tends to short-circuit the analytical thinking of even sophisticated marketers. But the CPM calculation — cost per thousand impressions, the universal currency of media buying — tells a more nuanced story.
The arithmetic is straightforward:
Super Bowl LIX (2025): - Cost: $8,000,000 for 30 seconds - Average viewership: 127,700,000 - CPM = ($8,000,000 ÷ 127,700,000) × 1,000 = $62.65
Calculated against total reach of 191.1 million unique viewers:
- CPM = ($8,000,000 ÷ 191,100,000) × 1,000 = $41.86
Now compare that to every other major ad buy in the market:
Platform / Event | Average CPM | Audience Quality |
|---|---|---|
Super Bowl (2025) | $42–$63 | Live, attentive, culturally engaged, zero ad-skipping |
Academy Awards (2025) | $85–$128 | Declining, fragmented |
Olympic primetime (2024) | $22–$28 | Spread across two weeks |
Sunday Night Football (regular) | $35–$60 | Live but smaller (15–20M) |
Average primetime broadcast | $15–$35 | DVR-shifted, low attention |
CTV / Streaming | $20–$50 | Growing but skippable |
$8–$20 | Scroll-past, 1–2 seconds of attention | |
TikTok | $6–$25 | High engagement, small per-impression windows |
YouTube pre-roll | $10–$30 | Frequently skipped |
Programmatic display | $2–$6 | Bot fraud, viewability issues, ~$5.82 avg |
The Oscars, it turns out, actually have a higher CPM than the Super Bowl — $85 to $128 versus $42 to $63 — while delivering one-sixth the total audience. As S&P Global reported in February 2025, the Super Bowl’s CPM has exceeded $55 for five consecutive years, a figure that industry analyst Simantel pegged at approximately $58.30 for 2025.
“But wait,” the performance marketer objects, “I can buy Instagram impressions for $9 CPM.” True. But what are you buying?
Drew Cashmore, a former Walmart Connect executive, framed the comparison this way in Modern Retail: “The Super Bowl has about a $58 cost-per-thousand views of an ad, but retail media costs in the range of about $10 CPM, so retail media at point of purchase is actually a significantly more efficient media buy than advertising at the Super Bowl.”
He’s right about the CPM. But the comparison collapses under scrutiny, because the units being measured are not equivalent. A Super Bowl impression is thirty seconds of undivided attention from a viewer who chose to watch and who will discuss what they saw with their friends, family, and social media followers for days afterward. An Instagram impression is a thumb scrolling past at three miles per hour. A programmatic display impression may not involve a human being at all.
EDO, the advertising analytics firm, quantified this gap: they estimate that one Super Bowl ad is equivalent to approximately 450 primetime TV spots in terms of viewer engagement. Kevin Krim, EDO’s CEO, told CNBC: “It’s a fair and rational price based on our data, which is that this has been one of the most consistent performers over time. And there’s room for the price to go up based on our data.”
At $20–$35 CPM for primetime, 450 spots reaching a comparable total audience would cost far more than $8 million — and they’d be spread across weeks, diluting the cultural impact to near-zero.
Digiday ran the numbers on what $7 million could buy on alternative platforms in 2024: 140–200 million streaming impressions, 2.8–3.9 million TikTok clicks, or 4.4 million Walmart Connect clicks. Impressive volume. But none of those buys would land your brand in the cultural conversation for a month, generate billions of social impressions, or produce an asset that continues generating returns for years.
Which brings us to the evidence.
What the Data Actually Shows
The case for Super Bowl advertising rests on an increasingly robust body of evidence — from academic research to platform analytics — that consistently points in the same direction.
The Kantar Verdict
Kantar, the world’s largest data, insights, and consulting company, maintains the most comprehensive longitudinal dataset on Super Bowl advertising effectiveness. Their finding: a single Super Bowl ad is more than 20 times as effective as a typical TV ad at driving brand perceptions. The average ROI of Super Bowl ads reached $5.20 for every dollar spent in 2024, nearly doubling from $2.70 in 2020. Strong Super Bowl ads — those in the top creative effectiveness tier — deliver three times the ROI and 40% higher ad recall than average Super Bowl ads.
The even more striking figure, Kantar found that Super Bowl ads delivered an average ROI of $8.60 for every $1 spent, making them 20 times more effective than regular TV ads.
The Stanford Study
Wesley Hartmann of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Daniel Klapper of Humboldt University ran perhaps the most rigorous academic analysis of Super Bowl advertising effectiveness. Their finding: Budweiser earns an extra $96 million in revenue from its Super Bowl ads, a return on advertising investment of 172%. Budweiser’s sales revenue in the short run after the Super Bowl is 15.75% higher per household than for competitors.
The iSpot/EDO Metrics
iSpot’s analysis of Super Bowl 2024 found that top-performing ads achieved 83.5% brand recall — a staggering 20 percentage points above the norm. EDO’s data showed the Super Bowl is three times as effective as average primetime programming for advertisers, with Super Bowl LIX specifically coming in at 224% more effective than primetime baselines.
The brand recall numbers are particularly striking when compared to regular television. Industry-wide, unaided recall for standard TV advertising hovers around 25–30%. For the Super Bowl, Ipsos research found that 87% of viewers could remember at least one advertiser unaided, with the average viewer recalling 3.5 brands without prompting.
Sales Lift: The Dollar Signs
The sales data tells the most compelling story:
Budweiser: 172% ROI, $96 million in incremental revenue.
Apple, 1984: $155 million in Macintosh sales in the three months following the “1984” ad — from a single airing. The ad generated millions of dollars in free publicity as news programs rebroadcast it that night.
Old Spice, 2010: The “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign, launched during Super Bowl weekend, drove a 125% increase in body wash sales within six months. The initial commercial garnered 10 million YouTube views within two months — ten times the views of Dove’s Super Bowl campaign that year. Follow-up real-time response videos added another 80 million views. A brand that was functionally dead — “your grandfather’s deodorant” — was resurrected into cultural relevance for an entirely new generation.
Doritos, 2022: Following their Super Bowl ad, Spicy Nacho Doritos saw a 19% increase in add-to-list behavior, Spicy Sweet Chili a 11% lift, and Original Doritos a 6% bump.
And the evidence extends beyond the two weeks after the broadcast. The most successful Super Bowl ads become cultural artifacts that generate returns for years or decades. Budweiser’s Clydesdales have appeared in Super Bowl ads since 1986 — a 40-year brand association that Stanford researchers estimate drives $96 million in annual incremental revenue. Their “Puppy Love” spot from 2014 accumulated 37 million YouTube views in its first week and over 2 million shares; it’s still watched and shared today. Volkswagen’s “The Force,” released in 2011, had 8 million views before it ever aired on television and was named by TIME as “the ad that changed Super Bowl commercials forever.”
Nielsen has described this dynamic as providing brands with “an almost endless annuity of earned media” — the Super Bowl ad becomes a permanent cultural artifact.
The Amplification Engine
The raw viewership is only the starting point. Super Bowl LIX generated 2.83 billion social media engagements across Instagram, X, and YouTube — a number that makes the 127.7 million live viewers look almost modest. Total social reach: 9 billion. TikTok halftime content alone accumulated 2.8 billion views.
The CeraVe campaign for Super Bowl 2024, created by Ogilvy, offers perhaps the most instructive case study of the modern amplification engine. Weeks before the game, the brand seeded fake paparazzi photos, influencer unboxings, and podcast appearances building the narrative: “What does Michael Cera have to do with CeraVe?” The pre-game earned media result: 9 billion impressions and $15.4 billion in earned media value — before the ad ever aired. The Chicago Booth Review called it the future of Super Bowl advertising: “marketing to the algorithms.”
Jed Meyer of Kantar put the dynamics plainly: “While having a spot in the Super Bowl now costs about $7 million per 30 seconds, the real media value in Big Game advertising comes from how the spot is amplified across a variety of channels. Those tactics get consumers to continue engaging with that campaign for days and weeks following the Super Bowl and drive additional ROI for the campaign.”
The Launch Pad
If the Super Bowl is the world’s most expensive billboard, it’s also the world’s most effective launch platform — the place where unknown brands become household names and category disruptors rewrite the rules overnight.
Coinbase: The QR Code That Broke the Internet
In February 2022, Coinbase paid $13 million for a 60-second Super Bowl spot and aired what appeared to be a screensaver: a colorful QR code bouncing around a black screen for 60 seconds, mimicking the classic DVD logo. Zero celebrities. Zero voiceover. Zero branding until the final frame. The QR code directed viewers to a landing page offering $15 in free Bitcoin for new account signups.
The results: app installs jumped 309% week-over-week. The app and website crashed from the traffic surge. It became the most talked-about ad of Super Bowl LVI — proof that in an environment where every other brand is competing with celebrity spectacle, radical simplicity can be the ultimate disruption.
But the deeper lesson was structural: Coinbase turned a traditional awareness play into a direct-response, data-capture event. The QR code didn’t just drive downloads; it built a first-party data asset.
Tubi: Fifteen Seconds of Genius
Tubi, the free ad-supported streaming service, had a problem in 2023: almost nobody knew it existed. Their solution was a 15-second spot designed to look like someone accidentally switched the channel — the Tubi interface suddenly popped up on screen during the broadcast. Viewers across America accused family members of sitting on the remote. After six seconds of confusion, the Tubi logo appeared.
The ad won the 2024 Grand Effie Award — the advertising industry’s highest effectiveness honor — plus Silver at Cannes Lions for “Challenger Brand.” Nicole Parlapiano, Tubi’s head of marketing, was candid about the strategy: “We didn’t have very high consumer advertiser awareness at that point, and so we were just trying to be stunty and get people talking about Tubi.”
It cost a fraction of a 30-second spot. It outperformed campaigns that cost ten times as much.
Liquid Death: From Cult to Mass Market
When canned water brand Liquid Death made its first national Super Bowl ad buy in 2025, it was a test of whether a brand built on punk-rock irreverence could translate niche energy to a mass audience. EDO’s engagement data definitively showed that the ad was 704% more effective than the average Super Bowl LIX ad, making it one of the three most engaging ads of the entire broadcast, alongside T-Mobile and RAM.
Liquid Death returned for Super Bowl LX in 2026 — proof that the ROI justified repeat investment. The lesson: brands with genuine cultural identity don’t need to sand off their edges for the Super Bowl. The edges are the differentiator.
Poppi: The DTC Graduation
Poppi, the prebiotic soda startup, used its first Super Bowl ad in 2024 as a declaration: we are no longer a DTC curiosity. We are a mass-market challenger to Big Soda. The results bore it out — Amazon sales increased 35% in the week following the broadcast. By 2026, under PepsiCo ownership, Poppi returned for its third Super Bowl, starring Charli xcx and Rachel Sennott.
The playbook is clear: for brands ready to make the leap from niche to mainstream, the Super Bowl compresses what would normally be a multi-year awareness-building process into a single evening. It is, in the most literal sense, a launch pad.
The Before/During/After Playbook
The brands that extract the most value from the Super Bowl don’t treat it as a single-day event. They run a three-phase operation:
Before (2–4 weeks): Release teasers. Seed influencers. Build anticipation. In 2012, 75% of the top 20 most-shared Super Bowl ads were launched before game day. Campaigns that released videos before game day generated 9.1 million YouTube views on average, versus only 1.3 million for those that waited. Volkswagen’s “The Force” pioneered this approach in 2011: released four days early, it had 8 million views before kickoff.
“It’s hard to think about now, but at the time, it was not the conventional wisdom to air or put online a commercial that was meant for the Super Bowl,” recalled Tim Ellis, former head of marketing at Volkswagen North America, speaking to TIME.
During: Staff social media war rooms for real-time engagement. The gold standard remains Oreo’s “Dunk in the Dark” tweet during the 2013 Superdome power outage — a moment widely credited with inventing real-time social media marketing. Activate retail media. Run promotional pricing to convert awareness into immediate purchase.
After (2–6 weeks): Sustain the creative messaging. Retarget viewers who searched for the brand. Marketing Dive recommends first-time advertisers plan for at least six weeks of supporting content after the game. Without sustained follow-through, the Super Bowl effect decays within two to four weeks.
The Conversion Funnel Nobody Talks About
Here is where the economics of Super Bowl advertising become most interesting — and most relevant — for consumer brands: the direct, measurable, immediate impact on ecommerce sales. Specifically, on Amazon.
This is the section of the Super Bowl advertising story that gets the least attention and deserves the most, because it transforms the Super Bowl from a brand-awareness play into a conversion engine with trackable, attributable ROI.
The Amazon Sales Spike
Jungle Scout Cobalt, which tracks Amazon sales data, published the most comprehensive analysis of Super Bowl advertising’s impact on Amazon revenue following Super Bowl LVIII (2024). The numbers are unambiguous:
Brand | Amazon Sales Lift (Week Post-SB) | Top Product Lift |
|---|---|---|
e.l.f. Cosmetics | +182% | Jelly Pop Dew Primer: +222% |
Nerds | +46% | Gummy Clusters: +100% |
Hellmann’s | +45% | 4-pack mayo: +280% |
Poppi | +35% | Classic Cola: +35% |
Reese’s | +31% | Party Pack Miniatures: +15% |
Lindt | +29% | Assorted truffles bag: +70% |
Skechers | +27% | Men’s Afterburn: +37% |
Google (Pixel) | +22% | Pixel 6a: +26% |
CeraVe | +20% | Moisturizing Cream: +18% |
Dove | +14% | Body care products |
The e.l.f. Cosmetics number is worth pausing on: a 182% increase in Amazon sales from a single Super Bowl ad. Not a 182% increase in awareness. Not a 182% increase in sentiment. A 182% increase in revenue, on the platform where the transaction actually happens.
Profitero’s data from the 2020 Super Bowl showed similar dynamics: Coke Energy Zero Sugar surged 197% in Amazon market share, Reese’s Take 5 jumped 131%, and Sodastream’s bundle pack climbed 118%.
Momentum Commerce’s analysis of Super Bowl LIX (2025) added another dimension: Nerds Gummy Cluster 8oz bags generated over $600,000 in Amazon sales in the two weeks following the Super Bowl — more than double the entire product line’s Amazon sales in the two weeks prior. Dozens of Super Bowl-related search queries shot into the top 50,000 most searched terms on Amazon during the first week of February 2025.
The Search Spike
The mechanism is straightforward but powerful: a Super Bowl ad triggers a massive branded search spike on Amazon. Academic research by David Reiley at Stanford documented significant search spikes within seconds of a Super Bowl ad airing. ALM Corp’s analysis puts the typical increase at 400–800% in branded search queries. That search traffic flows directly into Amazon’s conversion funnel — product detail pages, sponsored brand ads, and buy boxes.
The brands that capture this traffic are the ones that have prepared their digital shelf in advance. The brands that don’t are leaving money on the table.
The Activation Playbook
Momentum Commerce’s research identified a clear pattern separating the brands that maximize their Super Bowl investment from those that don’t:
The winners do this:
Update the digital shelf. New creative assets on Amazon storefronts, sponsored brand ads, and product detail pages, all aligned to the Super Bowl campaign. Angel Soft, Duracell, and Nerds all did this in 2025. Duracell featured Tom Brady — the star of their TV spot — in both their Amazon sponsored brand placements and their brand store.
Dramatically increase paid share of voice. Duracell increased its paid share of voice on Amazon by more than 6 percentage points during Super Bowl weekend — while no competitor moved even a single point. Nerds nearly doubled their paid share of voice in the gummy candy category, from 8.54% to 16.05%.
Time promotional pricing. Sodastream ran a promotional discount on Amazon during the 2020 Super Bowl broadcast to convert viewers into buyers in real time. The conversion loop — see ad on TV, search Amazon, find deal, purchase — can complete in under two minutes.
Start early. Consumer engagement with Super Bowl advertising begins before game day. The Amazon support strategy should reflect the extended timeline, not just the four-hour broadcast window.
Sustain the spend. The biggest sales lift occurs in the 7–10 days after the game, according to Zappi Research. Brands that pull back their Amazon advertising spend on Monday morning are cutting off the conversion funnel at the moment of maximum intent.
Coca-Cola provided the most elegant example of the TV-to-ecommerce conversion model in 2020, when they ran a Super Bowl ad for Coke Energy directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Jonah Hill — with an Alexa voice-commerce tie-in. Viewers could order Coke Energy via voice command during or immediately after the ad. Amazon market share surged 111% for the regular variant and 197% for zero sugar.
The Retail Media Convergence
The most sophisticated Super Bowl advertisers now think of their media plan as a single system: the TV spot creates awareness and intent; retail media (Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Instacart Ads) captures that intent at the point of purchase; and the digital shelf converts it into revenue.
“If someone tries your product for the first time during a Super Bowl promotion, RMNs allow you to keep that conversation going,” said Lori Johnshoy, head of global retail media network and CPG strategy at LiveRamp. “Retail media has become an always-on strategy.”
Sherry Smith, executive managing director of the Americas at Criteo, put it similarly: “Extending the runway for these initiatives can drive greater brand awareness and foster meaningful customer interactions, ultimately leading to sales before, during, or even after the event.”
The convergence of broadcast television and retail media is the most significant structural shift in Super Bowl advertising economics in a decade. It means that for CPG brands — which already account for roughly a third of all Super Bowl ads, according to Sensor Tower — the investment is no longer a pure brand play. It’s a full-funnel conversion event, with measurable revenue on the other end. The brands that treat it as such outperform those that don’t by orders of magnitude.
The Case Against (And What It Gets Wrong)
Skeptics of Super Bowl advertising make several arguments, and they deserve a fair hearing.
“The CPM is too high.”
At $58–63, Super Bowl CPM is roughly double average primetime. But CPM is a measure of cost per impression, and not all impressions are created equal. A Super Bowl impression — 30 seconds of undivided attention from a viewer who chose to watch, who won’t skip, and who will discuss it later — is not the same unit as a programmatic display impression that may involve a bot, a below-the-fold placement, or a user scrolling past at speed. EDO’s equivalency data — one Super Bowl ad equals ~450 primetime spots in engagement — suggests the attention-adjusted CPM is actually lower than alternatives.
“You can reach more people on digital for the same money.”
You can reach more impressions. Whether you reach more people, meaningfully, is another question. Digiday calculated that $7 million in programmatic could buy 140–200 million streaming impressions. But those impressions are scattered across weeks, fragmented across platforms, and delivered without any of the cultural amplification that makes a Super Bowl ad compound over time.
“Most Super Bowl ads don’t work.”
This is actually partly true — and it’s the most important caveat. Kantar’s data shows that strong Super Bowl ads deliver 3x the ROI and 40% higher recall than average Super Bowl ads, and that creative quality can multiply ROI by a factor of 12. The difference between a great Super Bowl ad and a mediocre one is not incremental; it’s existential. The brands that waste their money are overwhelmingly the ones that produce lazy, derivative creative — another celebrity cameo without a strategic purpose, another humor play without a brand connection.
“Not every brand should buy a Super Bowl ad,” said Nicole Penn, CEO of EGC Group, speaking to Marketing Dive. “We have a lot of clients that are very performance marketing-focused. For them, a $7 million spot would have to yield $7 million in revenue that moment.” She’s right — for a pure performance marketer with no brand-building ambitions, the Super Bowl is the wrong vehicle. But for a brand looking to shift its trajectory — to move from niche to mainstream, from challenger to contender, from known to unavoidable — the data says the Super Bowl works.
And the data is getting more precise every year. The combination of iSpot attention tracking, EDO engagement analytics, Jungle Scout Amazon sales monitoring, and real-time social measurement means that Super Bowl advertising effectiveness is no longer a matter of faith. It’s a matter of math.
