After a starring role in last year's Super Bowl broadcast, cryptocurrency firms are expected to be left out of the 2023 game.
But the annual advertising extravaganza, a kind of competition between vendors that runs parallel to the football championship, features a variety of beer companies and automobiles, along with other familiar brands like M&M candy, which has been tempting its place ever since. last month.
This year's slate of commercials revives the cult hit "Breaking Bad," whose cast reunites to launch PopCorners chips, as well as a collaboration between General Motors and Netflix showing an electric car navigating "Squid Games" and other hit scenes. of transmission.
The ads get a lot of money, usually $6 or $7 million for 30 seconds of airtime. That's about 10 times the cost of an ad during the 2022 World Cup match between the United States and Great Britain.
Last year's game generated $578 million in advertising revenue for NBC, $143.8 million more than the previous year's broadcast, according to Kantar, a brand consultancy and data analysis.
This year's game is being broadcast on Fox Sports.
โThat's a lot of money for a media ad,โ said Derek Rucker, a marketing professor at Northwestern University. But "where else can you get 100 million people to see an ad at the same time?"
Ads have become such an important component of gambling in the United States that among "a large number of people, there are consumers who actively watch and discuss commercials" at gatherings, Rucker said.
keeping it light
Held each year in the dead of winter, โSuper Bowl Sundayโ marks a time for families and friends to come together for several hours of competition, revelry and entertainment.
This year's game will be between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. As always, the show includes top-notch halftime entertainment, this time headlined by Rihanna.
Overblown ads are a longstanding tradition, and include ads as momentous as Ridley Scott's minute-long commercial for Apple in 1984 announcing the Macintosh computer.
The commercial, which features a female athlete smashing a screen displaying the figure of "Big Brother," is based on George Orwell's famous novel and concludes with the promise that the advent of the computer will show "why 1984 will not be like '1984'". โ
This year's most anticipated commercial may be for M&M's, which a few weeks ago began tiptoeing into America's culture wars.
On January 24, Mars-owned M&M's announced it would freeze an ad campaign featuring cartoon mascots for the colored candies after American conservatives criticized the campaign as "woke" due to stylistic changes, such as the introduction of a character purple, a color associated with the LGBTQ community.
M&M's announced an "indefinite hiatus" from "spokescandies" and unveiled a new brand ambassador, popular comedienne Maya Rudolph, in a perfectly timed shift to grab the public's attention ahead of a splashy ad. of the Super Bowl.
Andrew Frank, an analyst at Gartner, does not expect politically controversial announcements this year and predicts that brands will navigate carefully in a divided country where loud messages can backfire.
โThe antidote to backlash is humor, keeping it light,โ Frank said. โI think they would like to reduce all the toxicity around the culture wars and things like that.โ
beer Fest
Last year's game featured several highlights in the pop-ups cryptocurrency market, led by then-titan FTX and its founder Samuel Bankman-Fried.
FTX has since collapsed and Bankman-Fried has been accused of fraud. The fall of FTX and Bankman-Fried has created "an appropriate time for them to pause," Frank said.
To offset that loss of publicity, the Fox station can count on revenue from a broader range of brewers following the expiration of a longstanding exclusivity deal with Anheuser-Busch, the owner of the Budweiser brand.
Frank expects most ads to seek "leisure spending with upbeat messages of escapist entertainment," he said.
The goal is to "impart the feeling that all is well and that you don't need to be so frugal with your discretionary spending."
