044: Top Super Bowl Stunts Through History

Welcome to Will It Stick? podcast, where hosts Melissa and Alexis cover creative advertising campaigns, PR stunts, and marketing activations that brands of all shapes and sizes pull, and dive into the research and data to understand if it worked.

It’s almost that time of the year when big brands get ready to shell out major bucks for a 30-second spot in the Big Game, the Super Bowl. And this year in 2022, the price has gone up quite a bit for those brands who can afford to play. NBC holds the exclusive broadcasting rights for the Super Bowl in 2022, and they are supposedly asking as much as $6.5 million for one 30-second ad, which is up from last year when CBS held the broadcasting rights and was asking $5.6 million.

That’s a LOT of money for a half a minute, but to many brands – its well worth it.

But it seems that viewership for the big game is on the decline. Super Bowl LV (2021) averaged 96.4 million viewers across all platforms—take out the average-minute audience via streaming and linear TV looks to be just 90.7 million—the lowest since 2006. (Which was the last time ABC broadcast the Big Game.) I also found a study that was done after the 2021 Super Bowl that showed that Gen Z is the LEAST interested generation in the Big Game.

In fact, just 27% of Gen Z adults said that they were “very likely” to tune in to the Super Bowl LV, compared to 43% of millennials. But for now, there is still enough of the other generations left to make it worth the hefty advertising pricetag.

Do you have any idea how the Super Bowl became one of the biggest days in the advertising world? I’m not much of a football fan, but you can bet that I get pumped up to watch the commercial every year! And I’m not alone, Super Bowl commercials have become truly a cultural phenomenon of their own, and many viewers only watch the game just for the commercials. Super Bowl ads are amazing because it’s when brands pull out ALL the stops. There is often a truly movie quality to many of the ads – the cinematography is amazing. Many are insanely funny, many will make you cry and there are always some excellent celeb cameos. And when we aren’t entertained because an ad was amazingly good, we are entertained by how bad an ad is and many of us take to Twitter to share, bash, praise and talk all about the brands behind the ads.

In this episode we cover: