The hype for Super Bowl 50 officially has started.
The night after Super Bowl XLIX ended, CBS ran a 10-second promo during the popular prime-time series “NCIS LA” to let viewers know that the network will produce the 50th version of the game from Santa Clara, Calif., next year. The spot showed footage from Super Bowl I, which CBS carried alongside NBC — the only time the Super Bowl had two broadcasters covering the same game.
The mere existence of the spot is a preview of the levels of hype that will be attached to Super Bowl 50.
“Monday’s spot was more symbolic than anything else, to basically say that there’s a great tradition here. We did Super Bowl I and we will be doing Super Bowl 50,” said George Schweitzer, president of the CBS Marketing Group. “We wanted to plant the flag. We’re on the clock. Everything’s in motion.”
The Super Bowl already has a reputation for hype in normal years — but combine the fact that it will be the Super Bowl’s 50th anniversary with the game returning to the Bay Area for the first time since 1985 — and industry executives said the level of hype will be like never before.
“Nothing will compare with this,” Schweitzer said. “Everything surrounding the game is going to be magnified. The cultural significance of the 50th Super Bowl will be unprecedented.”
The day after the Super Bowl, CBS ad sales executives flew to Los Angeles to pitch advertisers, with a record-setting rate card of $5 million per 30-second spot. The network’s marketing group, though, headed back east for a series of meetings on the marketing of the game.
For CBS, marketing the game will have a similar feel to its “Thursday Night Football” campaign from last year, when entertainment, news and radio personalities helped push the message that the network was in the prime-time football business.
“The whole network is engaged, just like we were with Thursday night when we got all the stars involved,” Schweitzer said. “That will all be part of our new campaign for Thursday night leading up to Super Bowl 50.”
CBS’s full-fledged marketing campaign will start when the football season starts. But CBS plans to put its Super Bowl message in other sports events it carries, like March Madness and the Masters.
“It will be more about branding at this point than ‘The Super Bowl is coming,’” Schweitzer said. “It is so important to CBS that we’re on the air a year before. It will reach the sports public. Certainly as we get into the fall, it will get to the entertainment folks. We are pegging this as our golden year, our golden season. We have Sunday football. We have Thursday football again. And it will culminate with Super Bowl 50.”
