Super Bowl commercials

Super Bowl commercials, colloquially known as Super Bowl ads, are high-profile television commercials featured in the U.S. television broadcast of the Super Bowl, the championship game of the National Football League (NFL). Super Bowl commercials have become a cultural phenomenon of their own alongside the game itself, as many viewers only watch the game to see the commercials.^[3] Many Super Bowl advertisements have become well known because of their cinematographic quality, unpredictability, surreal humor, and use of special effects. The use of celebrity cameos has also been common in Super Bowl ads. Some commercials airing during, or proposed to air during the game, have also attracted controversy due to the nature of their content.

The phenomenon of Super Bowl commercials is a result of the game's extremely high viewership and wide demographic reach. Super Bowl games have frequently been among the United States' most-watched television broadcasts, with Nielsen having estimated that Super Bowl XLIX in 2015 had an average viewership of 114.4 million viewers in the United States, surpassing the previous year's Super Bowl as the most-watched television broadcast in U.S. history.^[4] As such, advertisers have typically used commercials during the Super Bowl as a means of building awareness for their products and services among this wide audience, while also trying to generate buzz around the ads themselves so they may receive additional exposure, such as becoming a viral video. National surveys (such as the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter) judge which advertisement carried the best viewer response, and CBS has aired annual specials chronicling notable commercials from the game. Several major brands, including Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Doritos, GoDaddy, Master Lock, and Tide have been well known for making repeated appearances during the Super Bowl.

The prominence of airing a commercial during the Super Bowl has carried an increasingly high price. The average cost of a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl increased from $37,500 at Super Bowl I to around $2.2 million at Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000. By Super Bowl XLIX in 2015, the cost had doubled to around $4.5 million, and by Super Bowl LVI in 2022, the cost had reached up to $7 million for a 30-second slot.

Super Bowl commercials are largely limited to the United States' broadcast of the game. Complaints about the inability to view the ads are prevalent in Canada, where federal "simsub" regulations require pay television providers to replace feeds of programs from U.S. broadcast stations with domestic feeds if they are being broadcast at the same time as a Canadian broadcast station. In 2016, the CRTC, Canada's telecom regulator, enacted a policy from 2017 to 2019 to forbid the use of simsub during the Super Bowl, citing viewer complaints and a belief that these ads were an "integral part" of the game; Super Bowl LI was the first game to fall under this policy. The NFL's Canadian rightsholder Bell Media challenged the policy at the federal appeals court, arguing that it violated the Broadcasting Act by singling out a specific program for regulation and devalued its broadcast rights to the game. While the appeals court sided with the CRTC, the Supreme Court of Canada overturned the ruling in December 2019 as a violation of the Broadcasting Act.^[5]