Super Bowl Ad Prices Top $8 Million as Surge Fuels Fox Sales
Super Bowl LIX is still days away, but someone has already scored a key Big Game touchdown.
Fox Corp. sold at least 10 of the commercials that will appear in its Feb. 9 telecast of the NFL championship between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles for more than $8 million, according to two people familiar with the matter, a new record price for Super Bowl inventory that shows how much more important the event has become to Madison Avenue in the streaming era.
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The Super Bowl “is the only place where you can aggregate legitimate scale with one commercial,” says Mark Evans, executive vice president of sales at Fox Sports. “It’s not like any other thing.”
Not too long ago, however, it was. By the end of last decade, the Super Bowl had hit a more fallow period where advertisers gained the upper hand, and the process of selling out all the ad inventory sometimes took until just days before kickoff. The NFL had increased regular-season inventory by securing deals for CBS, then NBC to air “Thursday Night Football,” meaning that advertisers had a glut of cheaper commercial time during the NFL regular season at the ready, and could run commercials more frequently for a smaller outlay of cash.
Now that streaming is reworking the economics of traditional TV, says Evans, there are just fewer places for big and small marketers alike to find big audiences all watching content at the same time. A good chunk of TV advertisers are taking money they once would have invested in primetime shows on cable, and even some on broadcast, says Evans, and moving that money into sports. “The NFL has benefitted from that,” he says.
Fox, which started out seeking around $7 million for 30 seconds of Super Bowl ad time, had disposed of the bulk of its Super Bowl LIX inventory in August. Still, demand continued even after Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch announced during the company’s third quarter investor call that all ads had sold out. Indeed, the recent California wildfires prompted a group of sponsors — including State Farm Insurance — to ask to be released from their deals, according to the person familiar with the matter, and Fox was able to re-sell their time for higher prices thanks to intense interest. Some of that activity may have spurred a portion of the hefty $8 million-plus pacts.
Even ads around the Super Bowl telecast have gotten more expensive. Thirty seconds of ad time in Fox’s late pre-game coverage have gone for as much as $4.5 million, according to one of the people familiar with the matter, comparted with $2 million in the past. A 30-second ad in Fox’s post-game coverage might go for around $4 million, this person says, compared with between $2.5 million and $3 million in the past.
Fox’s last Super Bowl telecast, in 2023, generated around $600 million in total ad revenue tied to the main event and ancillary programming.
Fox will be able to squeeze some extra commercials into the main event. The NFL, which has final say on the number of commercial breaks and ads in the Super Bowl, agreed to let the network add what is believed to be more than five as part of “floating” breaks that might surface after a time out or if a player is injured, or after an unexpected stop to game play. Fox and the NFL would share revenue from those commercials, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.
The commercials show up in what the NFL calls “flex pods,” says Mike North, the league’s vice president of broadcast planning. These breaks were created to stop too-frequent interruptions to game play, he says. The concept “lets you take advantage of downtime. If you’re lucky, you get to the fourth quarter and maybe eight minutes in the late game and the only break is if it’s the two-minute warning,” he says. “Now we can just play football, and let the game continue with rapid-fire action and excitement.”
Among the advertisers that have announced their presence in the 2025 game are Anheuser-Busch InBev, PepsiCo, Ferrara Candy Co.’s Nerds, Georgia-Pacific’s Angel Soft, Squarespace and Stellantis. Viewers can expect to see noticeably fewer automakers come out this year, says Fox’s Evans, and potentially fewer movie studios and streamers.
Fox’s good fortune with the Super Bowl may continue. NBCUniversal is slated to broadcast the event in 2026 and is likely to try to create packages that include the football spectacular, the Winter Olympics and the NBA All-Star Game. “I don’t see it slowing down anytime soon,” Evans says.
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