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CBS Primed for Record Super Bowl Sales Haul as Unit Prices Soar 11%

anthony crupi
·4 min read

While there’s no doubt that CBS’ broadcast of Super Bowl LVIII will prove to be the most-watched televised event of 2024, serving up an average audience of 110 million viewers or more, it remains to be seen if the network will deliver a record sales figure for Sunday’s game. That said, if CBS’ paid ad load is on par with Fox’s year-ago total (51 minutes and 15 seconds), the 58th installment of the Big Game will almost certainly generate an all-time high for ad revenue.

According to Guideline, a measurement service that taps into the transactional data of all six major U.S. media holding companies, the average rate for a single 30-second unit in the 49ers-Chiefs showdown was $6.47 million a pop. That marks an 11% increase versus last year’s rate, which worked out to $5.83 million.

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Guideline noted that some in-game spots were sold at rates that were somewhat below the estimated average unit cost, as legacy advertisers and/or those that invested in multiple commercials were likely given a break on price. Such was always the case when Anheuser-Busch held the exclusive rights to the beer category for 30-plus years, an interval in which Budweiser, Bud Light and other affiliated brands regularly snapped up eight units per broadcast.

On the other side of the ledger, marketers that snapped up their units in the scatter market paid higher rates than those that bought in the spring upfront bazaar, with those later buys coming in at $7 million and up. Guideline’s estimates are pegged to the primary broadcast on the CBS flagship; according to media buyers, units sold in the Nickelodeon simulcast topped out at around $300,000 a throw.

CBS announced that it was effectively sold out of its in-game spots in early November, although the host network nearly always reserves a slot or two for a free-spending late arrival. For example, while Toyota had planned on steering clear of the Super Bowl this year, the automaker threw its media plan in reverse last week with a buy designed to promote its 2024 Tacoma pickup.

Formed by way of a private equity merger between Standard Media Index and SQAD in 2022, Guideline’s media-spend data is particularly noteworthy, given its buy-side sourcing. While Guideline did not provide estimates of how much cash CBS is expected to generate on Sunday’s game, if the network didn’t allot an outsized portion of its inventory to in-house promos, it has a good shot at topping the high-water mark of $650 million that Fox reported as part of its May 2023 earnings call.

Besides being a license to print money, the Super Bowl is one of a very few TV buys that aren’t made against ratings guarantees. In other words, no matter how many people tune in to CBS on Super Sunday, the network won’t be on the hook for any makegoods or audience deficiency units (ADUs)—which means that Paramount gets to keep each and every dollar that’s been raked in by the sales team. Not that the TV turnout has ever really been in doubt; the last time the Super Bowl failed to so much as break the 80 million viewer mark was way back in 1992, when Washington beat Buffalo 37-24 in front of 79.6 million fans. (Joe Gibbs’ squad had a 31-10 lead heading into the fourth quarter.)

Guideline’s agency-derived data revealed that food will be the most-represented ad category this time around, supplanting last year’s top spender (entertainment). Viewers can also expect to see an uptick in pharmaceutical ads, while personal care products and toys/games will also take their place in the spotlight.

In addition to the Super Bowl data, Guideline provided further evidence that the sports TV market remains a very healthy outlier as the various streaming services continue to erode primetime entertainment deliveries. Ad spend in scripted and unscripted primetime fare was down 12% in 2023, while overall sports investment was up 4% year-to-year. NBA spend last year was up 17%, while the NFL—already the priciest buy on the dial—saw its overall ad spend grow 15%, as deep-pocketed marketers stick to the old angling metaphor, i.e., “fish where the fish are.”

Season-to-date, the average broadcast series is eking out 3.06 million viewers per episode, of whom just 497,841 are members of the adults 18-49 demo. By way of contrast, NBC’s Sunday Night Football averaged 19.7 million linear-TV viewers, a tally that includes 7.08 million adults under 50. As usual, the Sunday 4:25 p.m. ET window shared by CBS and Fox put up even gaudier numbers than the primetime NFL showcase, as the 18 broadcasts averaged 25.3 million viewers, of whom one-third (8.29 million) were part of the highly coveted 18-49 crowd.

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