How Much Money Is a Super Bowl Commercial 2015?

With some Super Bowl tickets selling for approximately $18,000, you might think this is expensive, but that cost pales in comparison to the price of a Super Bowl commercial slot. At $4.5 million for a 30 second ad for the 2015 Super Bowl game, it’s nearly 250 times as much as the cost of the most expensive ticket. It’s also a half million dollars more than Super Bowl commercials cost last year, with some advertisers choosing 1 minute ads for $9 million. Already, many of this year’s ads can be found online, although some companies have chosen to publish shortened segments of the 30-second ads that will run on Sunday (that’s right, there are commercials for the Super bowl commercials).

But the more pressing question is the following: are these ads still profitable for companies? Or is it simply something that profitable companies have gotten accustomed to doing–somewhat like a signifier to audiences? (See? We have a Super Bowl ad and so we must be cool!)

Here and Now, a NPR news program, posed this first question to media analyst and professor of mass communication at Boston University, John Carroll. According to Carroll, “It’s hard to tell. There’s a lot of different yardsticks for judging whether it’s worth the money. There’s no question it’s the biggest audience you’re ever going to find on television. And it’s one of the few times when the audience is actually paying attention to the ads instead of trying to ignore them. So…from that standpoint, it’s attractive to advertisers.”

But which advertisers? Interestingly, Carroll mentioned that car advertisements did very poorly last year, and so a number of companies such as Honda, Lincoln, Volkswagen and others chose not to submit commercials this year. This “opened a lot of new opportunities for newcomers” and this year, fifteen of the commercials are from companies who have never before advertised during the Super Bowl. Not surprisingly, one newcomer, super glue maker Loctite is spending more on this year’s Super Bowl commercial than they did on advertising during 2014 (approximately $4 million).

The newspaper Portland Herald has a compelling perspective on the number of ad newcomers this year. Interviewed advertising experts told the paper that the “rookie interest” is a positive sign that “companies are feeling good in the most recent economic recovery.”

With the increasing relevance of social media, it will also be interesting to see how many of these commercials are converted into hashtag quality material. For example, Loctite embedded in its commercial the hashtag “#winatglue.” Carroll also mentioned that 60 percent of last year’s ads also had accompanying hashtags, thus enabling the companies to get “extended value” from their commercial ads. Carroll expects that a higher number of ads will also feature accompanying hashtags this year.

Whether or not the ads will pay off, however, remains to be seen. Still, for advertisers, there’s nothing like approximately one hundred million individuals watching “the same thing at the same time” and subsequently discussing the merits of what they have seen. In that case, it may very well be with a $4.5 million gamble.