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Sex, Snacks and Videotape: A History of Super Bowl Ad Breaks

anthony crupi
·6 min read

In retrospect, it’s tricky to connect the dots between the low-stakes experiment that was the first Super Bowl in 1967 and the great American secular holiday/marketing extravaganza that the game is today. Not only was the Chiefs-Packers showdown promoted as the “First AFL-NFL World Championship Game,” but the receiver who hauled in the first touchdown pass of the new era was so hungover he couldn’t locate his helmet.

Despite airing on NBC and CBS simultaneously, what would later come to be remembered as “Super Bowl I” wasn’t the high-gloss, multimillion-dollar production that is now synonymous with Super Sunday. Until recently, it was believed that no copy of either broadcast existed; as was common practice in the late 1960s, both networks wiped their respective tapes to free up space for other content (read: soap operas). A technical glitch caused NBC to return too late for the start of the second half, which resulted in Green Bay having to re-do the kickoff, and a ruinously overserved Max McGee was wearing someone else’s helmet when he caught a first-quarter TD to put the Pack up 7-0. (Thinking he wasn’t going to see much action, the 35-year-old backup had staggered back to his hotel room at 6:30 a.m. that morning. Some guys give 100%, but Max McGee gave 100 proof.)

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For all that, the commercials weren’t exactly cheap—at least not compared to the $12 ticket price. The average cost of a 30-second spot in Super Bowl I was $42,500 a pop for marketers who bought time in the CBS broadcast (or $396,252 in today’s currency) and $37,500 (or $349,635) for those who targeted NBC viewers. The reason for the discrepancy: CBS drew higher regular-season ratings as the NFL’s TV partner, whereas NBC did smaller numbers with the upstart AFL’s games.

While obviously a success out of the gate, the early Super Bowls are a poor relation to the spectacles of the last 40 years. For one thing, it took five years for the broadcast to out-draw the 51.2 million viewers who tuned in for the ’67 game; CBS’ presentation of the sixth installment, a 24-3 Dallas blowout of Miami, averaged 56.6 million viewers. (Super Bowl VI also was the last to be blacked out in the host market.)

Moreover, the first Super Bowl aired in primetime was staged relatively late in the game, as the Cowboys and Broncos kicked off their Super Bowl XII showdown on Jan. 15, 1978 at 6:17 p.m. ET—nearly a decade after NBC aired the inaugural World Series night game (Oct. 13, 1971). The cost of a 30-second in-game spot: $162,300—still a relatively thrifty $795,558 in 2024 dollars. Not until 1995 would the average unit cost hit the $1 million mark, as ABC reached that benchmark in Super Bowl XXIX.

Since then, escalation has been the name of the game. In 2000, ABC would go on to chalk up another Super Bowl record, becoming the first network to command $2 million for a 30-second slice of airtime, which in turn led to NBC breaking the tape on the $3 million spot in 2009. Fox topped $4 million in 2014, CBS bumped the going rate to $5 million units in 2016, and the latest high-water mark was established with this year’s scatter rates, which exceeded $7 million a throw.

If much about the Big Game has changed over the years—long before megawatt stars such as Prince, the Rolling Stones and Beyoncé headlined the halftime show, the mid-game interval was haunted by the likes of Up With People, a troupe of visibly polite Stepford Children who made the Osmonds look like the Velvet Underground—the commercial breaks have remained fairly consistent. The automakers, snack manufacturers, breweries and film studios that clutter the in-season ad pods still snap up much of the available Super Bowl inventory, although fluctuations in macroeconomic conditions often lead to temporary spasms of categorical oversaturation. The so-called Dot-com Bowl of 2000 saw as many as 14 Internet startups jump into the fray, but after the bubble burst three months later, most of those advertisers would be underwater. Crypto pulled a similar vanishing act after sucking all the air out of the 2022 game.

For the most part, the steady drumbeat of ads for sweets and suds and sodas and sedans is in keeping of in-season spending patterns. This year, the top 10 categories (auto, insurance, movies, wireless, fast food, beer, financial services, etc.) accounted for three-fifths of all NFL ad spend, and while a handful of first-time marketers from relatively niche sectors always have a place at the table, the composition of the Super Bowl ad breaks largely mirrors that of the regular-season slate. A fair amount of NFL spend is predicated on a never-ending battle for market share; for example, the insurance category—which this season coughed up $607.7 million for a deep, deep bench of ads— is driven by the Cold War between Geico, Progressive and State Farm. Those three brands make up four-fifths of insurance’s $531.4 million NFL investment, and Progressive may be conspicuous by its absence this Sunday, as its rivals have cooked up a couple of jaw-droppers.

Assuming a baseline rate of $6.47 million per spot, the average cost of a single second of time in this year’s Super Bowl shakes out to $215,667. As much as the boom-and-bust cycle has disrupted the occasional Super Bowl ad load—car ads disappear in times of recession, and the dumb money that’s synonymous with irrational exuberance sometimes crowds out a few legacy advertisers—the hour-plus run of stuff that pays the bills remains largely familiar. The beer guys will trot out their [literal] dog-and-pony shows, the snack-makers are prepping the standard load of zany, celeb-freighted fare and the studios have locked in a bunch of overloud teasers for some films that we’ll have completely forgotten about by the time the next season of football kicks off in the fall.

The upshot: Something like 115 million people will be watching those ads and the game that surrounds it. And unless someone drops a TV on a kid’s head—looking at you, Nationwide—just about every dollar spent on commercial inventory should prove to be a sound investment. In the words of the battle-scarred, spavined Jets QB who almost single-handedly transformed the AFL-NFL World Championship Game into the Super Bowl, we guarantee it.

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