Super Bowl commercials
Super Bowl commercials, colloquially known as Super Bowl ads and sometimes referred to as Big Game spots for legal reasons, are high-profile television commercials featured in the U.S. television broadcast of the Super Bowl, the championship game of the National Football League. Super Bowl commercials have become a cultural phenomenon of their own alongside the game itself, as many viewers only watch the game to see the commercials. Many Super Bowl advertisements have become well known because of their cinematographic quality, unpredictability, surreal humor, and use of special effects. The use of celebrity cameos has also been common in Super Bowl ads. Some commercials airing during, or proposed to air during the game, have also attracted controversy due to the nature of their content.
The phenomenon of Super Bowl commercials is a result of the game's extremely high viewership and wide demographic reach. Super Bowl games have frequently been among the United States' most-watched television broadcasts; Super Bowl LVIII in 2024 had an average viewership of 123.7 million viewers across all platforms, which surpassed the previous year's Super Bowl as the most-watched television broadcast in U.S. history. As such, advertisers have typically used commercials during the Super Bowl as a means of building awareness for their products and services among this wide audience, while also trying to generate buzz around the ads themselves so they may receive additional exposure, such as becoming a viral video. National surveys judge which advertisement carried the best viewer response, and CBS has aired annual specials chronicling notable commercials from the game. Several major brands, including Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Doritos, GoDaddy, Master Lock, and Tide have been well known for making repeated appearances during the Super Bowl.
The prominence of airing a commercial during the Super Bowl has carried an increasingly high price. The average cost of a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl increased from $37,500 at Super Bowl I in 1967 to around $2.2 million at Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000. By Super Bowl XLIX in 2015, the cost had doubled to around $4.5 million, and by Super Bowl LVI in 2022, the cost had reached up to $7 million for a 30-second slot. As of 2026, the cost is estimated to be around $8 million.
Super Bowl commercials are largely limited to the United States' broadcast of the game. Complaints about the inability to view the ads are prevalent in Canada, where federal "simsub" regulations require pay television providers to replace feeds of programs from U.S. broadcast stations with domestic feeds if they are being broadcast at the same time as a Canadian broadcast station. In 2016, the CRTC, Canada's telecom regulator, enacted a policy from 2017 to 2019 to forbid the use of simsub during the Super Bowl, citing viewer complaints and a belief that these ads were an "integral part" of the game; Super Bowl LI was the first game to fall under this policy. The NFL's Canadian rightsholder Bell Media challenged the policy at the federal appeals court, arguing that it violated the Broadcasting Act by singling out a specific program for regulation and devalued its broadcast rights to the game. While the appeals court sided with the CRTC, the Supreme Court of Canada overturned the ruling in December 2019 as a violation of the Broadcasting Act.
Benefits
Super Bowl games have frequently been among the United States' most-watched television broadcasts. In 2025, Super Bowl LIX set an all-time record for viewership at the game, with an average of 127.7 million viewers across all platforms according to Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, exceeding a record set the previous year at Super Bowl LVIII, and making it the most-watched non-news television broadcast in U.S. history. Of the top twenty television broadcasts in the United States by viewership, only one program—the 1983 series finale of M*A*S*H—is not a Super Bowl, ranking in between XLIV and LII with 105.9 million viewers.The game broadcast not only attracts a wide audience, but a diverse audience spanning many demographics and age groups. For example, women have accounted for at least 40% of Super Bowl viewers. As a result, airing a commercial during the Super Bowl can be valuable for advertisers seeking an audience for their products and services. Many viewers watch the Super Bowl primarily for the commercials. In 2010, Nielsen reported that 51% of Super Bowl viewers enjoy the commercials more than the game itself.
Because of the overall buzz surrounding them, commercials aired during the Super Bowl receive additional airplay and exposure after the game as well, such as during newscasts and morning shows the following day. Since 2000, CBS has aired an annual television special prior to the game, Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials, which showcases notable Super Bowl ads from prior games, including those voted upon by viewers. A 2022 study by tech startup Advocado found that 42% of those surveyed tune in for the advertisements rather than the game and that 50% of those surveyed had made a purchase based on a Super Bowl ad. In 2015, Dish Network allowed the "Primetime Anytime" and "AutoHop" features on its Hopper digital video recorder, which automatically records primetime programs from the major networks and trims commercials from the recordings, to function in reverse and allow users to view a recording of the Super Bowl that skipped over the game itself and only included the commercials.
The popularity of video sharing websites such as YouTube has also allowed Super Bowl advertisements to become viral videos. To take advantage of this, a growing number of advertisers have elected to post previews of their commercial, or even the full-length commercial itself, online prior to the game. A notable example of this strategy occurred prior to Super Bowl XLV: on February 2, 2011, four days before the game, Volkswagen posted the full version of its Star Wars-themed ad "The Force" on YouTube. By Sunday, the ad had already received over 16 million views and went on to be the most shared Super Bowl advertisement ever. Ironically, until Super Bowl 50, official online streams of the Super Bowl provided by U.S. broadcasters did not include all of the commercials from the television broadcast; at Super Bowl XLIX, only 18 advertisers bought ad time within NBC's stream of the game. For Super Bowl 50, CBS mandated that each advertiser's purchase cover both the television and digital broadcasts, meaning that for the first time, the online stream of the game included all national commercials from the television broadcast.
Cost
Owing to the large potential audience, the network broadcasting the Super Bowl can also charge a premium on advertising time during the game. A thirty-second commercial at Super Bowl I in 1967 cost $37,500. By contrast, Super Bowl XLVI set what was then a record for the price of a Super Bowl advertisement, selling 58 spots during the game, generating $75 million for NBC; the most expensive advertisement sold for $5.84 million. Super Bowl XLVII and Super Bowl XLVIII both set the average cost of a 30-second commercial at $4 million. Super Bowl XLIX, also broadcast by NBC, surpassed that record with a base price of $4.5 million.Media executives projected that the cost of a 30-second commercial could exceed $5 million at Super Bowl 50, a figure that CBS confirmed. That price would serve as a plateau for all three Super Bowls held since then; Fox would match that figure for Super Bowl LI, NBC would slightly exceed for Super Bowl LII with a $5.2 million price tag, and CBS would slightly increase that to $5.25 million for Super Bowl LIII. Super Bowl LI would also, for the first time in the game's history, feature overtime play; four ads were broadcast between the end of regulation and the start of play, including two ads seen earlier in the game, and two ads that were sold for and also seen during the post-game show. While Fox had negotiated ad sales for overtime in the event it was to occur, it is unknown whether the network charged a premium on top of the base cost. In comparison, Sunday Night Football, the flagship primetime game during the regular season, had an average cost of around $700,000 for 30 seconds of time in 2017.
The average cost of a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl increased by 87% between 2008 and 2016, before stabilizing since then. Slightly fewer spots were sold for Super Bowl LIII than the previous game, leading to a noted increase in the number of ads aired for network programming in comparison. Fox was reported to have charged around $5 to $5.6 million for 30 seconds of commercial time at Super Bowl LIV. CBS kept the price steady at around $5.5 million for Super Bowl LV in 2021.
As the 2018 Winter Olympics marked the first time since 1992 that the Winter Olympics and Super Bowl were shown by the same network in a single year, NBC offered advertisers the opportunity to purchase packages of time for their ads covering both Super Bowl LII and the Olympics. NBC stated that doing so would allow advertisers to amortize their expenses through additional airplay during the Olympics. To prevent the 2022 Winter Olympics from cannibalizing advertising revenue and viewership for Super Bowl LVI, CBS agreed to exchange the game to NBC for Super Bowl LV in 2021. NBC subsequently charged between $6.5 and 7 million for a 30-second commercial, with Fox and CBS holding steady for 2023 and 2024 respectively. The average price was $8 million on Fox in 2025.
The high cost of purchasing advertising time, on top of the cost of producing the commercial itself, has led to concerns by marketers that the increased sales that can result from a Super Bowl commercial do not recoup the cost of buying the ad time. In the early 2010s, advertisers such as Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, General Motors, and Pepsi chose to skip the Super Bowl due to the high costs of advertising—although Pepsi would return in 2013, followed by GM in 2014. As a lower-cost alternative, some advertisers have elected to purchase advertising time during the games' extended pre-game shows, or from individual network affiliates that are broadcasting it.
With the introduction of simulcasting across multiple networks for Super Bowl LVIII, CBS simulcast most of the game's commercials on its Nickelodeon children's simulcast of the game. As some of the advertisers involved adult-only products such as beer and gambling, Nickelodeon sold separate advertisements as replacements, each selling for up to $300,000 per advertisement, compared to $8,000,000 per advertisement for the main broadcast. The Hollywood Reporter said that the cost is from a minimum $10 or $12 million to over $20 million for an advertisement. Celebrities including Glen Powell, Catherine O'Hara, Matt Damon, Billy Crystal, Meg Ryan, Willem Dafoe, David Beckham, Seal, and Matthew McConaughey were paid $3 million to $5 million to appear in ads. Cameo appearances made by Sydney Sweeney, Charli XCX, Kevin Bacon, and Greta Gerwig earned them a lower rate.