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While Eagles fans are still licking their wounds, retail and CPG brands are reaping the rewards from their 2023 Super Bowl ads.
Roughly 113 million people tuned in to last Sunday’s game, on par with the 112 million viewers from 2022, according to Nielsen. With the high viewership, brands that mostly leaned into humor, according to Nielsen competitor iSpot.TV, were able to drive above average purchase intent from viewers, with 22% of respondents indicating they were “much more likely” to purchase the advertised product after viewing an ad.
Alcohol brands—including Anheuser Busch, Heineken, Diageo, Remy Martin, and Molson Coors—were big advertisers in this year’s big game. Packaged foods staples—like Doritos, M&Ms, and Planters—also ran spots.
- The average ad cost $7 million this year for up to 30 seconds, up from $6.5 million from 2022.
- Fox, which hosted the broadcast, delivered 64.1% of all advertising impressions during the game and 83.4% of all TV ad impressions compared to other networks.
Stunt on them: One of the commercials that garnered the most impressions came from pet food brand The Farmer’s Dog. The company purchased a 60-second spot, and it was one of five commercials from Sunday that had at least 100 million household TV ad impressions, per iSpot.
For the M&M’s commercial, the company pulled a bait and switch and permanently brought back its “spokescandies” that it previously said it would ax in favor of new representative Maya Rudolph. Steve Merino, chief creative director at Aloysius Butler & Clark, told Marketing Dive that M&M’s failed to take advantage of the moment. “I’m still not 100% sure what M&M’s was trying to do,” he said.
In Molson Coors’s return to the Super Bowl, the company opted to highlight Blue Moon beer.
- The company drummed up attention before the game, partnering with DraftKings to let customers predict which brand would be highlighted.
- Anheuser-Busch had many spots that ranged from Michelob Ultra to Busch Light to Bud Light.
An influencer’s game? Last year’s Super Bowl brought additional, organic attention to retail brands that integrated social media into their marketing efforts. For example, Pepsi and Amazon were two companies that garnered the most social-media impressions during last year’s game, according to influencer marketing firm Captiv8.
- According to historical data, activating a specific group of influencers with a combined reach of 16.8 million followers solely through TikTok only cost $315,000. Last year’s Lay’s campaign brought in 379.5 million TikTok views (and still counting) from its Super Bowl spot.
“People are looking at content throughout the day— before the game, during the game…and then subsequently after the game, things start to grow even more significantly,” Captiv8 co-founder and CEO Krishna Subramanian told Retail Brew. “What we’ve seen is campaigns, like those hashtags, just have a much higher staying power outside of the 30 seconds that are on TV.”