Super Bowl Advertisers in next year’s Super Bowl are hoping they will get to party like it’s pre-pandemic 2020.
The following written content by Brian Steinberg
Advertisers in next year’s Super Bowl are hoping they will get to party like it’s pre-pandemic 2020.
Earlier this year, Fox Corporation took in about $600 million in advertising revenue for its broadcast of Super Bowl LIV and pre- and post-game coverage, Lachlan Murdoch, the company’s executive chairman, said earlier this year. The game itself, aired on the Fox broadcast network, generated around $435 million, a record haul, according to Kantar, a tracker of ad spending. With a booming economy as a backdrop, Fox was able to sell out all of its regular inventory for the game by November of 2019 — the first time in half a decade that the network airing the game hasn’t had to go down to the wire to accomplish the feat.
Now CBS, which is scheduled to air Super Bowl LV on February 7 of 2021, faces a radically different situation. Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, the network’s executives expect their sales process to take longer than Fox’s, according to two people familiar with the matter, and note that one factor giving potential sponsors pause is figuring out what kind of tone to strike with audiences next year.
Madison Avenue agrees. “I think the only thing different this year is that everything is different this year,” says John Patroulis, the worldwide chief creative officer of Grey, a WPP agency that has created Super Bowl ads for the NFL, E-Trade and others.
In a typical Super Bowl cycle, most advertisers would have committed to the game in late summer, giving their ad agencies time to plan a creative concept, devise special effects, and possibly hire celebrities or license popular music for ads. Agency executives say coronavirus conditions have complicated the logistics of production, and wonder if some advertisers may come in to the Super Bowl at the last minute, requiring a whirlwind of activity to get them ready.
More worrisome, perhaps: The pandemic will likely squelch many Super Bowl parties, forcing advertisers to recalibrate their efforts to attract consumers watching in quieter environments. “A lot of people won’t feel safe enough to get together, and that dynamic changes things,” says Eric Baldwin, executive creative director at the Portland office of Wieden + Kennedy, which has produced Super Bowl ads for Coca-Cola and others. Read more from Variety.
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