2021.02.05 今年的超级碗广告将看起来有所不同

shiyi18

Daily chart
Super Bowl advertising will look different this year
Big names are forgoing the game, but broadcasters can still expect record returns

Feb 5th 2021

THE STANDS at the Super Bowl on Sunday will look more like those at a pre-season football game than at America’s biggest sporting event. Because of covid-19 restrictions, spectators will fill less than half of the 65,890 seats in the Raymond James Stadium in Florida. Nevertheless, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Kansas City Chiefs could provide the most exciting Super Bowl in years. Tom Brady, the Buccaneers’ quarterback and perhaps the greatest of all time, will face off against Patrick Mahomes, his young opposite number, who is gunning for Mr Brady’s reputation. The Weeknd, a Canadian singer, will make the half-time show as bombastic as ever. And although the stadium will be half-empty, advertising revenue suggests Americans’ interest has never been keener.

The average cost of a 30-second ad during this year’s game is expected to reach $5.6m, according to Kantar, a market-research firm. That is a 7% increase from last year (see chart), and the highest ever. Broadcasters’ in-game advertising revenue reached a record $448.7m last year; there were 46 minutes of ads during the broadcast. CBS, the channel showing this year’s Super Bowl (it shares the honours in rotation with Fox and NBC), may nudge half a billion dollars during the game.

Some Super Bowl viewers pay more attention to the blockbuster ads than the game itself. This year, amid a pandemic-induced recession, the commercial breaks will feel different. In recent years cars and beers have been the most-hawked products (see chart), and the ads have been glossy boasts by brands. Last year’s presidential election also brought expensive political ads, with the campaigns of Mike Bloomberg and Donald Trump each spending around $10m for minute-long slots. Expect more po-faced, pared-back ads and a helping of corporate humility this time around, to match the mood of a nation reeling from the coronavirus.


Brands such as Budweiser, Coke and Hyundai, some of the biggest names at past Super Bowls, are forgoing the event. Budweiser is crowing that it will instead donate money to America’s vaccine effort (although Bud Light, another beer produced by AB InBev, Budweiser’s maker, will feature). Tech companies, boosted by the surge in remote working and virtual socialising during the pandemic, are still spending big. For example Logitech, a Swiss-American maker of webcams and other gadgets, will air its first ever Super Bowl ad, a 60-second production featuring Lil Nas X, an American rapper. And Robinhood, the online broker that infuriated users last week when it suspended trading in shares of GameStop, a struggling seller of video games, hopes to move on from the controversy with an upbeat ad that proclaims “we are all investors”.

On January 27th CBS revealed that it had “virtually sold out” its advertising slots for the game. Last year almost 150m people watched the Super Bowl on Fox, making it the 11th-most watched broadcast in American history. Nine of the ten ahead of it are also Super Bowl games (the other is the finale of “M*A*S*H”, a Korean-war comedy, screened in 1983). The impact of the pandemic on this year’s broadcast will be hard to miss, but the Super Bowl still tops the advertising leagues.




每日图表
今年的超级碗广告将看起来有所不同
大公司放弃比赛，但广播公司仍然可以期待创纪录的回报

2021年2月5日

星期天的超级碗比赛的看台看起来更像是季前橄榄球比赛的看台，而不是美国最大的体育赛事。由于covid-19的限制，观众将填补佛罗里达州雷蒙德-詹姆斯体育场65,890个座位中的不到一半。尽管如此，坦帕湾海盗队和堪萨斯城酋长队可能会提供多年来最激动人心的超级碗比赛。汤姆-布雷迪是海盗队的四分卫，也许是有史以来最伟大的四分卫，他将与他的年轻对手帕特里克-马霍姆斯对决，后者正在向布雷迪先生的声誉发起冲击。加拿大歌手The Weeknd将使半场表演一如既往地轰动。虽然体育场将是半空的，但广告收入表明美国人的兴趣从未如此强烈。

根据市场研究公司Kantar的数据，今年比赛期间一个30秒广告的平均成本预计将达到560万美元。这比去年增加了7%（见图），也是有史以来最高的。广播公司的赛内广告收入去年达到了创纪录的4.487亿美元；广播期间有46分钟的广告。CBS是播放今年超级碗的频道（它与福克斯和NBC轮流分享这一荣誉），在比赛期间可能会接近5亿美元。

一些 "超级碗 "的观众对大片广告的关注程度超过了比赛本身。今年，在大流行病引起的经济衰退中，广告时间的感觉将有所不同。近年来，汽车和啤酒一直是最受关注的产品（见图），广告也是品牌的光鲜吹嘘。去年的总统选举也带来了昂贵的政治广告，迈克-布隆伯格和唐纳德-特朗普的竞选活动在几分钟的时间里各花费了约1000万美元。预计这次会有更多面无表情、简约的广告和企业的谦逊，以配合国家对冠状病毒的不安情绪。


百威啤酒(Budweiser)、可口可乐(Coke)和现代汽车(Hyundai)等品牌是过去超级碗比赛中的一些大牌，它们都放弃了这次比赛。百威啤酒(Budweiser)宣称，它将为美国的疫苗工作捐款（尽管百威啤酒的制造商百威英博(AB InBev)生产的另一款啤酒百威淡啤将参加）。科技公司在大流行期间受到远程工作和虚拟社交活动激增的推动，仍在大肆支出。例如，罗技（Logitech），一家瑞士-美国网络摄像头和其他小工具的制造商，将在超级碗上播放其第一个广告，这是一个60秒的广告，由美国说唱歌手Lil Nas X演唱。上周，在线经纪商Robinhood暂停了GameStop（一家陷入困境的电子游戏销售商）的股票交易，这激怒了用户，它希望通过一则宣称 "我们都是投资者 "的乐观广告来摆脱争议。

1月27日，哥伦比亚广播公司透露，它已经 "几乎卖光了 "该游戏的广告时段。去年，近1.5亿人观看了福克斯电视台的超级碗比赛，使其成为美国历史上收视率第11高的节目。排在它前面的十场比赛中有九场也是超级碗比赛（另一场是1983年放映的韩战喜剧《M*A*S*H》的决赛）。大流行病对今年的广播的影响将难以忽视，但超级碗仍然在广告联盟中名列前茅。