Super Bowl Ads Can't Save TV
Fortune|February 2018

Marketers will spend millions on television advertising during football’s main event. If only they cared more about it the rest of the time.

Erika Fry
Super Bowl Ads Can't Save TV

THE BIG GAME a few hours on Feb. 4, everything will be peachy in ad land. A nationwide audience, more than 100 million strong, will gather round their televisions and pay rapt attention to commercials that cost roughly $5 million a (30-second) pop.

The occasion, of course, is the Super Bowl. Long a triumph of modern marketing—an annual ritual in which the ads are as big a deal as the athletics—Super Bowl LII looks to be especially so. Despite cord cutters and ad-skipping DVRs, flagging NFL ratings, and the ever-shrinking American attention span, big brands (Budweiser and Coca-Cola) and even some no-names (Avocados From Mexico) are still eager to pony up a huge chunk of their marketing budgets for a spot during the big game. (A decade ago, the cost for this was just $2.7 million). “It’s such a predictable, high-quality event,” explains Manish Bhatia, CEO of Kantar Media North America.

Last year’s broadcaster, Fox, fetched $534 million in advertising revenues from the one-day bonanza. This year’s, NBCUniversal, also has rights to the 2018 Winter Olympics, and expects to rake in more than $1 billion between the two sporting events.

This story is from the February 2018 edition of Fortune.

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This story is from the February 2018 edition of Fortune.

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