Comparable to China's "Spring Festival Gala", the annual American grand ceremony - "Super Bowl" ended, the scene was luxurious, the big coffee gathered, coupled with the audience was full, the audience was boiling, making people forget that the United States is still in the new crown epidemic.
The 56th Major League Soccer (NFL) Annual Championship, the "Super Bowl", ended in Los Angeles, USA, on the 13th local time. As one of the largest marketing IPs in the sports world, the Super Bowl once again proves its powerful ability to absorb money.
According to ticketing search engine TicketIQ, the final tickets for the Super Bowl were sold at a price of 950 to 6200 US dollars per ticket, that is, about 6030 yuan to 39400 yuan per ticket. The SoFi Stadium, one of the most expensive stadiums in the world, has 70,000 seats and can be expanded to 100,000 people. Based on this calculation, the NFL can earn at least $66.5 million based on ticket revenue alone.
That's just a fraction of the NFL's revenue. The Super Bowl is broadcast live by three television stations, NBC, FOX, and CBS. The three stations take turns paying the NFL $3 billion in royalties each year, and this year NBC is in charge. After entering 2023, the NFL has raised its broadcast costs to $10 billion per year.
No one is going to lose money. Television stations that have been granted live broadcast rights have made a lot of money because of the "Super Bowl". According to market research firm Kantar, the average price of a 30-second ad this year is $6.5 million, and some are as high as $7 million, which is higher than the price of $5.5 million per article broadcast by CBS last year. NBC said more than 70 ads have been sold this year, and the Super Bowl has brought more than $500 million in advertising revenue.
"If you want to see how the U.S. economy is moving at a given time, just look at the ads on the Super Bowl." Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University, said.
"Traffic King" and "Cargo Master"
The commercial value is so high, first of all, the "Super Bowl" is the "traffic king" of the American sports industry and even the entire entertainment industry, and this event is known as the "American Spring Festival Gala".
In fact, the commercial value of the "Super Bowl" has long been discovered by major enterprises. Before the COVID-19 outbreak, Market Research Firm Statista estimated in 2019 that the Super Bowl ranked first in the sports event list with a commercial value of $780 million, much higher than the second place, the Summer Olympics with a commercial value of $375 million.
Before this year's game, according to the National Retail Federation, about 180 million U.S. adults said they planned to watch the Super Bowl, accounting for nearly 55 percent of the country's adult population.
Mark Marshall, head of NBC's advertising business, said the actual result is that the total number of viewers watching the Super Bowl is expected to reach 100 million, up from 96.4 million last year. On the last Sunday of the Super Bowl, about 49 million people watched the playoffs. This shows that the ratings of the NFL have risen this year.
And achieving such results is not easy. In recent years, the ratings of many competitions in the United States have declined. According to the New York Times, even though the epidemic has made everyone stay at home longer, in 2020, the ratings of the NBA Finals are still down 49% year-on-year, and the ratings of the North American National Hockey League are down 61% year-on-year.
American media Thestreet analysis said that after entering the streaming media era, viewers switched from watching TV to watching videos, and the viewing habits were not as before to watch at a specific time, which was an important reason for the decline in the ratings of many events in the United States. In contrast, the Super Bowl is still high in traffic, and it is one of the few sports events that viewers can watch on TV for a fixed period of time, which undoubtedly makes its advertising sponsorship price more expensive.
Dan Lovinger, executive vice president of advertising sales at NBCSports, also said that the reason why so many advertisers are willing to advertise to the Super Bowl is that the U.S. economy has strong signs of recovery. "When consumers are more willing to spend, advertisers are more willing to advertise." he said.
For the full year of 2021, U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 5.7 percent, recording the strongest U.S. growth rate since early 1984, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. In the fourth quarter of last year, U.S. GDP grew by 6.9 percent, with personal consumption spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the U.S. economy, driving 3.3 percent of the economy. Goldman Sachs' latest forecast says that in 2022, the US economy will grow by another 3.4%.
Consumer companies such as food, beverages, and automobiles have historically been frequent customers of Super Bowl ads. In the past 40 years, Budweiser has been absent only once last year. Commenting on why this year's return to Super Bowl advertising, Daniel Blake, the company's vice president of marketing, said: "It's because we feel like this year will be a great opportunity to promote the resilience of the U.S. economy." ”
Not only that, but travel companies are keenly aware of signs of U.S. economic recovery. To get Americans on vacation again, online travel site Booking and its rival Expedia have invited actors like Idris Elba to help with their ads.
Arjan Dijk, Chief Marketing Officer of Booking, said: "We deliberately created a relaxed ad and filmed a scene of a holiday home farther away from the city, in order to attract tourists who were worried about the 'suspicion' of gathering crowds. ”
According to kastle Systems, a market research firm, the size of air travel in the United States has roughly recovered to about 80 percent of the outbreak. Data from the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) shows that on the 11th, the flow of people through U.S. airport security checks exceeded the same period in 2019, approaching 2 million passengers.
Electric cars dominate the Super Bowl ads
In addition to the usual consumer companies, this year's "Super Bowl" advertisers have more than a dozen new faces. From biomedical companies such as CueHealth, to technology companies such as Greenlight Financia, to new energy vehicle companies such as Wallbox, this reflects the development and changes of the US economy to some extent.
In 2022, electric vehicle companies will undoubtedly dominate the Super Bowl ads. Car companies have traditionally been big contributors to Super Bowl ads, and six of the seven auto ads this year are pushing electric vehicles. Facebook's meta-universe, Amazon's Alexa, Google's new mobile phone and other technology products are also the guests of this Super Bowl.
GM hired Mike Myers, the actor of "Ace Spy," to shoot the theme ad. In this advertisement, "climate change" has become a common enemy. BMW invited Arnold Schwarzenegger to play the ancient Greek god. In the advertisement, the birth of BMW's new electric car has filled Schwarzenegger with "electricity" again. The ads for Polestar, an electric vehicle startup expected to go public this year, are even more inflammatory, challenging competitors such as Tesla and Volkswagen directly.
Kevin Krim, chief executive of advertising analytics firm EDO, said electric vehicle companies flocked to Super Bowl ads because it could actually boost their sales. EDO's data shows that due to the advertising for electric vehicles in 2021, the number of consumers searching for Audi's electric vehicles that year is 90% more than that of fuel vehicles.
However, Ashwin Amberkar, an analyst at market research firm Canalys, said that while the ads reflect the direction of the automotive industry, they do not yet reflect the current sales of electric vehicles. According to data recently released by Canalys, global electric vehicle sales currently account for only 9% of passenger car sales.
Amberca believes that compared with European countries, the development of the electric vehicle industry in the United States still has a long way to go. In some European countries, electric vehicle sales already account for nearly 25 percent of passenger car sales, compared with nearly 4 percent in the United States.
Amberca also said automakers are also in an awkward position to advertise some electric cars that cannot be sold immediately.
In this year's advertisement, GM advertised 30 electric vehicles that will not be officially available until 2025. Canalys data shows that in general, the cycle from design to production of a new electric vehicle is about 9 to 12 months.
"Automakers are telling consumers that they're saving the world so they can take it over." Still, as GM summed up in the ad — the change could take a lot longer than expected. Amberka said.
In fact, the steady recovery of the US economy may also take much longer than expected.
First of all, the trend of the epidemic in the United States is still not optimistic. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, as of the 14th, the cumulative number of confirmed covid-19 cases and deaths in the United States has exceeded 77 million and 910,000, respectively, far higher than other countries. According to Ourworldindata, a data agency affiliated with the University of Oxford, as of the 14th, the United States accounted for 64% of its total population, and the population with one dose of vaccine accounted for 12% of its total population. But the new strain still brings a large number of infected people, threatening the U.S. health care system.
And decades of the strongest inflation is eating up the U.S. economy's report card and exacerbating the divide between rich and poor. The latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the U.S. inflation rate (CPI) rebounded in January, up 7.5 percent year-on-year, the fastest increase since February 1982, and the ninth consecutive month that the data reached or exceeded 5 percent. According to gallup, a pollster, despite strong U.S. economic growth, 49 percent of respondents believe that rising prices have caused difficulties in family life, while 9 percent said rising prices have caused "serious" difficulties. At the same time, the global divide between rich and poor has intensified during the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in developed countries such as the United States. The "rich tax" proposed by the Biden administration has long been difficult to promote, and this time the "Super Bowl" may be the most gorgeous bubble flower after the "helicopter money".