Super Bowl 2024 Live | Kansas City Chiefs to face San Francisco 49ers | Kinds of sports
Advertising, another show
Super Bowl Sunday is here and, as always, there is a long list of advertisers ready to compete for fans’ attention during halftime of the game. Broadcasting a Super Bowl commercial is no easy task. Beyond the $7 million it costs to run a 30-second commercial during the game, brands hire top actors, invest in dazzling special effects and try to create ads that will appeal to more than 100 million viewers or at least make them remember this.
“It’s hard to get attention, and there’s really no one recipe,” says Lingli Xu, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota. “It has to fit (every) brand.”
This means advertisers will have to get creative and use different approaches. Some favorites, like Budweiser’s Clydesdales, evoke nostalgia year after year. Others try to make viewers laugh with light humor and endless celebrity cameos. And some use more serious or emotional tones that evoke a response.
Many advertisers have already launched their ads ahead of Sunday’s game between the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs, which airs on CBS and Paramount+ in the US. Some of these commercials include Christopher Walken impersonating him for BMW all day, rapper Ice Spice sipping a Starry after a “breakup” with another lemon-lime soda, and ETrade talking about babies making a comeback in the commercial , showing them playing pickle ball – or “basically tennis for babies.”
There have also been a lot of reunions in TV series promotions this year. Jennifer Aniston seems to have forgotten that she ever worked with her Friends co-star David Schwimmer, for example, on an Uber Eats commercial. And in an ad filled with celebrity cameos including Judge Judy Sheindlin, Elven cosmetics unites Suits stars Gina Torres, Rick Hoffman and Sarah Rafferty in a courtroom parody.
Of course, not all advertisers publish their ads in advance, so there will be surprises on Sunday. In a US presidential election year, we may see a statement from a candidate. And while there have been no signs of this, many are wondering if advertisers will take advantage of Taylor Swift’s popularity in any way.