Super Bowl spending reached $1.72 Br over the past 20 years.

The hype around Super Bowl XLI is not just around the four remaining teams fighting for a chance to compete for the 2007 championship. As advertisers and marketers begin to anticipate the TV commercials that will appear in this year’s game, TNS Media Intelligence once again searched its extensive database to report on the past 20 years of Super Bowl advertising.

According to TNS Media Intelligence, advertising during the Super Bowl game has accounted for 682 minutes – over 11 full hours – of commercial time throughout the past 20 years (1987-2006). Those 11 hours represent 221 different advertisers, more than 1,400 commercial announcements and translate into $1.72 billion of network advertising sales.

Top 5 Super Bowl Advertisers

The top five Super Bowl advertisers of the past 20 years have spent $613.4 million on advertising during the game, accounting for 35 percent of total advertising dollars spent in the game. Anheuser Busch and Pepsico, advertisers in every Super Bowl game since 1987, continue to lead the pack, followed by General Motors and Time Warner.

While last year’s report (covering 1986-2005) listed FedEx Corporation as the fifth top advertiser, the company was replaced in this year’s report (covering 1987-2006) by Walt Disney. This is especially interesting as FedEx Corporation has advertised with the Super Bowl for 19 years, while Walt Disney has only advertised with the Super Bowl for the past seven years.

Each year, about 62 percent of the network TV ad money invested in the game comes from incumbent marketers who ran commercials the previous year.

“While that’s a very high retention rate, it’s actually lower than the comparable rate for two other showcase TV events. Over the past 10 years, the average dollar retention rate has been 78 percent for the Academy Awards and 67 percent for the World Series,” said Jon Swallen, senior vice president of Research at TNS Media Intelligence.

The Price of Advertising

The cost of an advertisement in the Super Bowl has more than quadrupled in the past 20 years, reaching $2.5 million in 2006 for a 30-second unit. For the 2007 game, CBS is reportedly fetching over $2.6 million for each 30-second spot.

What Constitutes the Super Bowl “Event”?

While the spotlight typically falls on the marketers who buy network commercial time in the game, the Super Bowl is actually a much larger TV advertising event.

Ad sales in the pre- and post-game coverage, plus ad sales by the network’s local affiliate stations, are important components when considering the Super Bowl as an ad revenue-generating machine.

For every dollar spent on network in-game ads, these ancillary sources contribute as much as an extra 74 cents.

More Advertising, More Clutter
The ABC telecast of the 2006 Super Bowl contained a record amount of commercial time – over 47 minutes of ads. This included paying sponsors plus “house ads” aired by ABC to promote its own programming. Over the past eleven years, the volume of commercial time in the game has been edging upwards:

The Top Super Bowl Advertising Category-It’s Not What You Think!

What kinds of products are most frequently advertised on the Super Bowl? The popular perception is that beer, soft drinks and autos are the prime ad categories, given their annual presence in the game.

Actually, the perennial leader is promotional advertising from the network itself. In a typical Super Bowl, one-fourth of all commercial time is a plug by the network for its own programming. The value of that air time in 2006 alone exceeded $52 million.

How Big is the Super Bowl Versus Other Sporting Events?

The Major League Baseball’s World Series and the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship are two other high-profile sporting events that attract significant interest from TV advertisers. But how do these compare to the Super Bowl in terms of ad spend?

The World Series is four to seven games. March Madness peaks with the semi-finals and championship on its final weekend, a total of three games. The Super Bowl, of course, is a single telecast. And while the World Series may have a higher advertiser retention rate than the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl still rakes in more network TV ad dollars than each of the other multi-game events.

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