The Super Bowl this year was a disappointment to many non-sports fans. Despite the halftime show being a hit, the reason a lot of people watch the Super Bowl is for the commercials. This year, they did not seem to be quite as successful at wooing audiences as they normally are. The commercials normally feature a celebrity doing something silly, like Post Malone in the Bud Light Seltzer advertisement. Or they feature a gimmick, no matter how strange, that will attract a lot of social media coverage, like Planters’ killing of Mr. Peanut, only to bring him back as a child with the hashtag, “BabyNut.”
The job for each company was to make the audience watch the Super Bowl and, at the end, remember the ad the most. Whoever had the most tweets about their ad or whatever ad had the biggest celebrity was crowned the winner. It did not matter how many increases in sales the company would get for killing their mascot and bringing it back as a baby Yoda rip-off. It mattered more if the audience liked the ad, or at least talked about it.
The Super Bowl commercials cost $5.6 million for just 30 seconds of screen time, according to Business Insider. In the case of some companies, who had multiple ads or whose ads ran longer than 30 seconds, they could have spent closer to $11 million for those commercials.
Forty-nine Super Bowl commercials aired this year, according to Vulture. If each advertisement cost $5.6 million, then the combined price that each company paid to air the commercial, not to film or pay the actors, but to just air the commercial works out to be around $275 million, on top of filming costs. The price to get Post Malone or Lil Nas X into a commercial would increase the price even more, of course. The money spent on these advertisements alone could have gone to a charity that could help stop climate change, stop homelessness, cure cancer or fix any other of the nearly infinite problems that the world has right now. The same could be said for any money that is spent ever, but when that high of a sum is going toward a 30-second advertisement that no one will think about four days later, it is disturbing to see how little that amount of money means to these corporations.
What is even more startling is the viewers’ willingness and eagerness to see these insane displays of wealth. As previously mentioned, some people only go to Super Bowl parties or turn on their television during the game to see the commercials. Most of the people viewing these commercials are not thinking about the amount of money it took to create that ad or how much it cost to air. In fact, the viewer is probably more concerned if there will be enough pizza for how many guests they are having over to watch the game.
The viewer is not thinking about how the $5.6 million that some corporations paid for a 30-second moment of fame is more money than the average American will spend in their entire lifetime, according to Reader’s Digest. There are bigger problems in the world, like corrupt politicians, continents on fire and the Ozone layer, but the money spent at the Super Bowl could be put to better use.
Photo from Baby Nut via YouTube
