CBS is keeping prices for Super Bowl advertising right around where they were last year. A thirty second ad will cost around $5.5 million for Super Bowl LV. FOX charged as much as $5.6 million for thirty seconds of air time during Super Bowl LIV and ended up netting $525.4 million in ad revenue.
According to The Wall Street Journal, CBS is making one new demand of advertisers. They will also have to pay to be on the digital stream of the game. That will cost an additional $200,000.
Advertisers are seeking protections. The Journal’s Alexandra Bruell writes that many agencies are asking for a way out of advertising commitments in the event that the Covid-19 pandemic makes it impossible to play the game.
“That is partly because the Super Bowl is so much bigger than anything else on TV, and commands so much more attention, that it would be hard for a TV network to make good on the lost ratings points for advertisers if the game wasn’t played.”
Leagues that have returned with a plan to play in a bubble have seen few to no Covid-19 cases and those seasons have largely resumed without a hitch. That hasn’t been the case with Major League Baseball, which not only isn’t using a bubble to isolate teams and players, but is having them fly to games and stay in hotels. Multiple players and team staff have contracted Covid-19, forcing several games to be postponed or cancelled. The NFL will also not use a bubble when its season begins next month. News out of the college football world is also likely giving advertisers pause, with four FBS conferences choosing not to play in the fall and multiple others pressing forward despite infections on teams and on campus.
Prices reported to the media are just a starting point in negotiations when a company commits to buying ad time during the Super Bowl. Even with some flexibility in price, several ad buyers told Bruell that they are advising clients to avoid the Super Bowl, or at the very least, wait until there is reason to believe the game is going to happen before committing.
“I’d be cautiously considering any Super Bowl investment with the uncertainty of sports and the marketplace,” Mediahub’s executive director of investment Carrie Drinkwater told Bruell. “To commit that amount of money to something that is an unknown seems at this time fiscally irresponsible.”
