Will Super Bowl Commercials Be Very Different in 10 Years?

The Super Bowl remains the pinnacle television event in the US calendar, boasting massive audience figures every year on Super Sunday. The game averages in the region of 100 million viewers, and is now one of the last bastions of when families and friends can gather around the television to watch as a group.

It remains to be seen how long that will last into the future with the Super Bowl now readily available on tablet and mobile devices. Now that computers and other devices have become so sophisticated, it will be possible even to watch the game on picture-in-picture on your laptop while playing online.

Superbowl Ads

The Super Bowl has been impervious to struggles of television companies to sell advertising. As people have drifted away from traditional television towards streaming services on Apple and Android devices, television companies are finding life more difficult to sell spots on their respective channels.

Superbowl Ads

The NFL’s pinnacle event continues to dominate and this year’s event has seen another increase in the amount needed to buy a 30-second window for a commercial up to $5.6m up from $5.25m – a rise of seven percent. This is a great deal more than the $1.7m that companies have to pay for a slot in the NCAA Basketball final and the $830,000 for a commercial slot during the NBA Finals. In fact, research has found that Fox Sports had sold all 77 of their slots by November, which has surprised even experts in the business.

Super Bowl commercials have a unique hold over the audience and result in greater interest in the game even for people who don’t follow the NFL as closely and will likely not be paying attention the rest of the year, for instance to the next major event in the calendar, the NFL Draft where Joe Burrow is being backed in the NFL lines to be the first player selected at odds of 1/33 as of 30th January. That’s the magic of the Super Bowl and for companies advertising during the game – there is a diverse range of people to cater and companies can afford to be wild and wacky with their ideas.

However, all this could change in the future.

The NFL is currently locked into a deal with three television companies to broadcast the Super Bowl. CBS, Fox and NBC all rotate to broadcast the game every three years, but the rise of Amazon and perhaps even Apple TV could put them under threat. The change in broadcaster could alter the way in which commercials are utilised, which could see companies target customers with algorithms in the same way as they do online through the use of cookies and browsing history.

The days of broad-spectrum commercials that appeal to the whole of the United States and beyond could be coming an end, although the requirement for being viral is already important with the advertisements being replayed online through Youtube and other mediums. The broadcast of the Super Bowl could look very different in the next 10 years.