Now that the books are closed on NBC’s production of Super Bowl XLIII, I’m already anticipating the market for next year’s game on CBS. I fully expect CBS to maintain the $3 million price point for a 30-second spot next year, regardless of how the economy fares in the next 11 months.
But it won’t be easy.
CBS will have to persuade advertisers to buy the most expensive airtime in the U.S. television market during the worst economic downturn in generations.
Talk in industry circles recently suggested that CBS should consider dropping the rate to as low as $2.5 million in an effort to spur sales and get more advertisers into the game.
But CBS should not move off of the $3 million price point. It’s the right call.
Advertisers will grumble about value and a new marketplace. But CBS eventually will persuade them to buy into the game by focusing on three main areas:
Steelers-Cardinals proved the Super Bowl
is the safest route to a mass audience.
1. Sell the ratings: Could anybody have predicted that a Super Bowl with the Arizona Cardinals would become the most-viewed Super Bowl ever? Sure, the ratings were driven by the nail-biting finish. But this year’s game proved that the Super Bowl is by far the safest bet for advertisers looking to reach a mass audience.
Look at the numbers: A record-high 98.7 million viewers and a 42.0 Nielsen rating.
“You know the Super Bowl is going to be there, and you know it’s going to get a 40 rating,” one ad sales executive said. “You can’t get that anywhere else.”
2. Focus on bulk sales: The $3 million rate will make headlines again next year. And a handful of one-off advertisers will buy into the game at that price.
But the fact is that most deals are packaged with the pre- or postgame shows, not to mention other properties on the network. NBC packaged buys with its NFL regular season and NHL programming, for example.
In the fall, NBC said it had sold about a dozen of the 67 available spots at $3 million — about 18 percent.
“While we’ve been asking for $3 million, we’ve been asking as loudly, if not louder, for peripheral investment to give me a reason to write it for less than $3 million,” said Seth Winter, NBC’s senior vice president for ad sales, in the weeks before the game.
3. Get the movie studios to buy in: Both Fox and NBC credit ad buys from movie studios with helping their games sell out over the last two years, and CBS should do whatever it can to make sure they come back in next year.
Hollywood sees the Super Bowl as the perfect launching point to preview its first-run trailers for spring and Memorial Day releases. Hollywood also reacted well to the red carpet launched by Fox for the 2008 game, so CBS should roll out its own version at a minimum and talk with studios about other ways the network can promote their major releases in next year’s game.
The bad news for CBS is that, because of the economy, there’s virtually no chance that the network will have the same early success that NBC enjoyed last fall and Fox had in 2007.
NBC came out of the Olympics in late August with the Super Bowl 85 percent sold.
The meltdown of the world’s financial markets in September, though, virtually shut down the sales process, and NBC went into the week before the Super Bowl with up to 10 spots that they still needed to move.
NBC sold the remaining spots for about $2.7 million to $2.8 million, just off of the $3 million price point.
Given the deals some advertisers cut at the end of the sales process, I expect several to wait until closer to Super Bowl XLIV to buy, even if it means losing out on premium positions in the game.
But expect CBS’s ad sales team to fan out in the market in the next few weeks to see if there’s an appetite for that $3 million rate. Though CBS will get a lot of pushback, I can’t imagine a scenario where it goes into the market at a rate of less than $3 million.
John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com.
