ViacomCBS Asking $5.5M For Super Bowl Ads

Viacom's CBS is seeking around $5.5 million for 30-second commercial spots in next year’s Super Bowl, roughly in line with commercial prices in the 2020 game, according to The Wall Street Journal citing people close to the talks.

CBS is also apparently requiring advertisers in the Super Bowl telecast to appear in the game’s online stream, at an additional cost of roughly $200,000.

Ad buyers are asking for a way out of their Super Bowl commitments, however, if the coronavirus forces the National Football League to halt the coming season or otherwise not play its championship game, the people close to the talks said.

That is partly because the Super Bowl is so much bigger than anything else on TV, and commands so much more attention, that it would be hard for a TV network to make good on the lost ratings points for advertisers if the game wasn’t played.

“There’s no plan B for Super Bowl,” said Tom McGovern, president of Optimum Sports, a sports marketing group at Omnicom Group Inc.

Every year, brands spend millions of dollars producing commercials and buying ad time for the Super Bowl, one of the few remaining places to reach a mass audience. The 2020 game in February drew 102 million viewers on the Fox network as well as digital platforms and its Spanish-language channel. Fox’s Super Bowl ad revenue totaled $525.4 million, according to ad data firm Kantar.

In February, 30-second Super Bowl commercials on Fox Corp. ’s Fox went for as much as $5.6 million, including ad placement on both the TV and digital screen.

CBS’s decision not to seek a more significant price hike fits market trends this year, which remains marked by uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic, ad buyers said.

Many marketers have cut advertising in response to the economic damage caused by the pandemic, particularly in categories such as movies and retail, but brands with ad dollars to spend are still likely to be tempted by the Super Bowl’s outsize audience.

The sticker price for Super Bowl ads is just a starting point, and many advertisers pay less depending on the amount of time they want to buy and their historic spending in the game.