NFL Ad Sales Hot for CBS as Super Bowl Poised for Early Sellout
If you’ve got $7 million burning a hole in your pocket and you’d like to spend it on a 30-second ad in Super Bowl LVIII, the time to call CBS Sports ad sales chief John Bogusz was yesterday.
With 166 days to go before the NFL title tilt kicks off in Las Vegas on Feb. 11, Bogusz and his team has sold 90% of CBS’ available in-game spots, leaving the network with fewer than 10 units on its plate. Given marketers’ increasing enthusiasm for longer-form spots of 60 seconds or more, Bogusz and CBS’ NFL sales guru Tony Taranto are effectively just a few phone calls shy of a complete sellout.
“We are pacing well ahead of when we had the game last time,” Bogusz, the longtime exec VP, advertising of CBS Sports, said during an afternoon media session.
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Of course, no Super Bowl is ever definitively off the market until the whistle blows after the opening kickoff. Networks always have the option of selling inventory that might otherwise have been set aside for in-house promotions, and it’s standard operating procedure to salt away a few units when the film studio inevitably comes pounding on the door on the eve of the Big Game. (Hollywood latecomers pay a steep premium for their last-second Super Sunday buys, which is about what you might expect from an industry that spends more money on marketing than on production.)
Regardless of how Bogusz decides to manage the remainder of CBS’ in-game inventory, the network is well on its way toward matching the $650 million that Fox raked in on this year’s Eagles-Chiefs title game.
In terms of a more proximate timeframe, the regular-season inventory is also going fast. “We are 85% sold going into this season, which is actually slightly ahead of pace where we were last year at this time,” Bogusz said.
The strength of CBS’ NFL sales underscores how sports functions as a luxury market within the greater TV ad space. During this summer’s upfront bazaar, pricing for live sports was up between 5% and 8% versus the year-ago period, while the going rates for units in broadcast entertainment programming were down as much as 10%. While the stark difference in upfront pricing is in some ways a reflection of how the writers’ and actors’ strikes have disrupted TV’s production schedule, ad dollars go where the eyeballs are.
And our collective eyeballs are riveted on the NFL. Last season, CBS’ national Sunday afternoon window averaged 24.7 million viewers, a figure which includes some 7.32 million adults 18-49. The average episode of primetime TV during the same period eked out 3.7 million viewers, including 544,573 adults under 50. The NFL accounted for 82 of the top 100 most-watched TV broadcasts in 2022, while not a single entertainment show managed to crack the list.
“While there are challenges out there across the board in the ad marketplace, sports continues to hold up extremely, extremely well,” Bogusz said.
Advertisers were particularly eager to claim space in CBS’ first exclusive coast-to-coast NFL window, a Sept. 17 matchup between Aaron Rodgers’ Jets and the league’s top TV draw in Dallas. Other intriguing dates on the calendar include an Oct. 22 AFC West air war between Patrick Mahomes and Justin Herbert and the plum Commanders-Cowboys showcase on Thanksgiving Day. With its stacked Sunday afternoon windows and a slate of postseason games, CBS is expected to book more than $1.4 billion in total NFL ad sales in 2023-24, an estimate that includes the standard allotment of spots that are redeemed as audience-deficiency units.
CBS’ NFL campaign kicks off Sunday, Sept. 10, with four early regional telecasts and three 4:20 p.m. EDT games. Most affiliates will air Eagles-Patriots in the late-afternoon window, which is set to air opposite Fox’s Packers-Bears coverage.
(This story has been updated to adjust the figure in the first paragraph from $6.5 million to $7 million.)
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