After a starring role in last year’s Super Bowl broadcast, cryptocurrency firms are expected to sit out the 2023 game. The annual advertising extravaganza—an unofficial competition among marketers that runs parallel to the American football championship—features an array of beer and car companies, along with familiar brands like M&M’s candies, which has been teasing its spot since last month. This year’s slate of commercials revives the cult hit “Breaking Bad,” reuniting its cast to pitch PopCorners chips, and includes a collaboration between General Motors and Netflix that shows an electric car navigating “Squid Game” and other settings from streaming hits. The spots command top dollar, typically $6 – $7 million for a 30‑second air time, roughly ten times the cost of an ad during the 2022 World Cup match between the United States and Britain. Last year’s game generated $578 million in advertising revenue for NBC, up $143.8 million from the prior year’s telecast, according to Kantar, a data‑analytics and brand consultancy. This year’s game will be telecast by Fox Sports.
“It’s a lot of money for a media spot,” said Derek Rucker, a marketing professor at Northwestern University, “but where else can you get 100 million people to see an ad at the same time?” The ads have become such a big component of the game in the United States that, according to Rucker, “a massive number of people actively watch and discuss the commercials” at gatherings.
Held each year in the dead of winter, “Super Bowl Sunday” marks an occasion for families and friends to gather for several hours of competition, revelry, and entertainment. This year’s game will pit the Kansas City Chiefs against the Philadelphia Eagles, and, as always, the show will include A‑list halftime entertainment, this time headlined by Rihanna. Over‑the‑top ads are an old tradition and include epochal spots such as Ridley Scott’s minute‑long 1984 commercial for Apple, which announced the Macintosh computer. That ad featured a female athlete smashing a screen showing a “Big Brother” figure, riffing on George Orwell’s novel and concluding with a vow that the computer’s arrival would show “why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”
The most anticipated commercial this year may be for M&M’s, which began tiptoeing into the U.S. cultural wars a few weeks ago. On January 24, Mars announced it was freezing a publicity drive featuring the cartoon mascots of the colored candies after conservatives criticized the campaign as “woke” because of stylistic changes, such as the introduction of a purple character—a color associated with the LGBTQ community. M&M’s then announced an “indefinite pause” of the “spokescandies” and unveiled a new brand ambassador, comedian Maya Rudolph, in a move timed to grab public attention ahead of a splashy Super Bowl ad. Andrew Frank, an analyst at Gartner, does not expect politically controversial ads this year, predicting brands will navigate carefully in a divided country where strident messages can backfire. “The antidote to backlash is humor, keeping it light,” Frank said. “I think they would like to de‑escalate all of the toxicity around culture wars and things like that.”
Last year’s game featured several prominent spots from the emerging cryptocurrency market, led by the then‑titan FTX and its founder Samuel Bankman‑Fried. Since then, FTX has collapsed and Bankman‑Fried has been indicted for fraud. The fall of FTX created “an appropriate time for them to take a pause,” Frank noted. Countering that loss of advertising, broadcaster Fox can count on revenues from a wider range of beer companies following the expiration of a longstanding exclusivity deal with Anheuser‑Busch, the owner of Budweiser. Frank expects most spots will target “leisure spending with lighthearted messages of escapist entertainment,” aiming to “impart a sense that everything is okay and that you don’t need to be so frugal about your discretionary spending.”
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