Super Bowl commercials are still big draw and still cost a lot

A cat meowing for Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Peyton Manning chucking Bud Light beers to patrons in a bar and Kris Jenner stacking Oreo cookies. They all have one thing in common: Those companies paid seven figures to get their products in front of viewers during this year’s Super Bowl.

For the second consecutive year, the average cost of a 30-second ad spot during the Super Bowl was $7 million. Even as many businesses are being more disciplined with the money they have for marketing, and with spending on advertising slowing in recent years, the cost of a Super Bowl ad continues to go up.

The reason is simple: There is no opportunity guaranteed to reach more people than the Super Bowl, and the slice of every other pie keeps shrinking.

In an increasingly fragmented media landscape, the number of opportunities for companies to reach a mass audience through advertising on network television has dwindled. Popular shows have increasingly moved to streaming platforms, along with audiences. More and more, networks find themselves relying on live events, like award shows and sports, to draw viewers.

“Live events are still huge for advertisers, and those are the ones that draw the highest attention,” said Frank Maguire, a vice president at Sharethrough, an advertising integration platform.

Not all live events are created equal, though. A record-low audience watched the Emmy Awards in January. Leagues like the NBA and the NHL have struggled to retain and increase viewership, and ratings for the NCAA men’s basketball final have fallen in recent years.

The Super Bowl stands alone as a mass-marketing opportunity on television. A decade ago, the average cost of a 30-second spot was $4 million; a decade before that, it was $2.4 million. Analysts say the rise is a result of supply and demand: With a fixed amount of time and advertising spots for each Super Bowl broadcast, the competition is fierce. CBS, which will broadcast Sunday’s game, sold out its ad spots in a matter of weeks in November. Paramount, which owns CBS, will reportedly run nearly a dozen spots to promote its films.

Together, the Super Bowl’s ads are an annual snapshot of the economic and social moment in the country, said Ethan Heftman, a vice president of agency sales at Ampersand, an ad consortium owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox.

“As long as you have new industries — auto, cellular, tech companies,” Heftman said, “there’ll always be brands seeking that broad awareness.”