It cost an average 7 million dollars to put an ad up during yesterday’s Super Bowl game. And companies and religious organizations spent millions more for celebrity endorsements.
Beyonce, Tom Brady and Jennifer Lopez were just a few of the A-list celebrities featured in this year’s Super Bowl ads.
Fred Cook directs the USC Center for Public Relations. He says ad agencies are overusing celebrities and that it reduces the effectiveness for the brands.
Fred Cook: What has happened over the past few years it’s been getting this way for a long time, is that the ad agencies and the clients for them are totally relying on celebrities. And they use them with such frequency that you can’t even remember after the Super Bowl, which celebrity was in which ad. So I think that the fact that everyone is the same dilutes the impact of any of them. And honestly, you can’t remember the brands that are associated with them.
Beyonce is one of the many stars whose celebrity garnered her more attention the brand she represents. At the end of Verizon’s Super Bowl commercial, she announced her new album and released two new singles immediately after airing.
Cook: It was brilliant of her. Whether it did anything for Verizon, I don’t know. But it certainly created a lot of awareness for Beyonce and this new album. I went to Spotify right afterwards and listened to that song.
Cook says he was surprised by the ad from He Gets Us, a religious advertising campaign.
Cook: Probably the one about Jesus, I think was the one was most unexpected. I think that’s the first time that I recall seeing a Christian organization put a Superbowl ad up about Jesus Christ.
He Gets Us was one of the few organizations to reserve multiple commercial slots during the broadcast. The most, coming from Chinese e-commerce site Temu, who had three 30-second ads with the tagline: Shop like a billionaire.
Sean Cudjoe is an undeclared sophomore. He expressed skepticism about Temu’s multiple ads during the game. At the end of 2023, Temu was the fifth-largest digital advertiser in the United States but has also developed a reputation for missing packages and mysterious charges.
Cudjoe: So personally, I feel like Temu may be a scam. I think it’s really suspicious that they have so many different advertisements, because if it costs like a million dollars, even put one during the Superbowl time, having like three to four in there. All right. I’ve seen enough of Temu.
Journalism major Kristian Nunez says the Super Bowl ads play a big role in keeping viewers entertained.
Nunez: The ads are kind of the fallback, I believe, because a lot of people go into the Super Bowl, not really football fans, I’d say just kind of a part of the hype, like a bandwagon. And so the ads are kind of there to keep them, you know, kind of entertained through the whole thing.
While the Super Bowl is supposed to be about the game, this year, excitement seemed to be centered more around the celebrities attending the game and starring in commercials rather than the athletes on the field.
For Annenberg Media, I’m Ari Rose-Marquez.
Correction: The lead image has been updated to reflect Annenberg Media’s newsroom image use guidelines.