Would it even be the Super Bowl if there wasn’t a blog post asking about your favorite commercials? Are your top choices dictated by the product, the celebrity, or the content? Did you prefer the spoofs on something familiar or the entirely new and unexpected? I look forward to this debate every year. It all stems back to 2006, when a friend and I traveled to Italy and happened to stumble upon the set of something being filmed. Little did we know that it was for a Super Bowl commercial, which we literally learned when watching the Super Bowl weeks later and seeing it air live. (Note: Our friends were not nearly as impressed as they should have been when we screamed with delight that we’d unknowingly seen the ad be filmed.)
Why are Super Bowl ads so popular, and why are they so expensive? According to Sporting News, the cost of a 30-second Super Bowl commercial this year is $7 million, up from $6.5 million in 2022, $5.5 million in 2021, and $5.6 million in 2020 (Note: When the Super Bowl began in 1967, apparently 30-second ads were less than $50,000!) As Sporting News explains, “Part of what makes the Super Bowl such a lucrative broadcasting opportunity for a network is the number of commercials that can fit into the window. According to Statista, the Super Bowl can have between 80 and 100 commercials, with 70 airing during 2020. Statista reports there are an average of 50 minutes of advertisements. For networks, that would mean $700 million worth of 30-second ads.”
So back to the main question: what were your favorite Super Bowl ads this year?