What’s $8 million for a 30-second spot when you’re lighting money on fire anyway?
You didn’t think AI ads were going to end at those uncanny valley Coca-Cola polar bear commercials, did you? No, that’s just the start, and the deluge will begin on Super Bowl Sunday. Per a report in the The Hollywood Reporter, AI companies are getting ready to pour their seemingly endless piles of venture capital cash into the pricey 30-second ad slots that most people use as an excuse to grab more chips.
In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Fox Sports executive vice president of ad sales Mark Evans said “AI is coming. If it’s not already here in almost every business, it will be coming like a freight train.” While he didn’t say which companies will be hawking their wares during the most-watched television event of the year (it’s probably not hard to guess: Microsoft, OpenAI, Alphabet, etc. will all likely get into the mix), he did say there will be lots of “AI-focused” offerings.
And they’ll pay a handsome price for the opportunity to encourage people to accelerate an energy crisis: 30-second slots during this year’s Chiefs-Eagles showdown will cost companies more than $8 million—a new record-high for Super Bowl ad spots. And here I thought inflation was coming down. That is on top of the amount companies spend to actually create the ads, which can often be tens of millions of dollars itself. For example, Amazon’s “Mind-Reading Alexa” ad from 2022 had a $26 million price tag attached to its production.
While the AI ads pour in, the creatives seem to be on the outs. Evans told THR that movie studios and streamers are spending less this year. Maybe that’s for the best: Given the recent US Copyright Office ruling that found the use of AI tools to assist in the creative process does not undermine a work’s copyright, it seems there’s more slop coming to the movie business in the future.
If this year’s Super Bowl is the year of AI, maybe it’s a sign that the bubble is about to burst. When crypto went all-in on the Super Bowl back in 2022, it was supposed to mark the moment the digital currencies arrived in the mainstream. Instead, it preceded a reckoning. Before the next year’s Big Game could roll around, FTX had gone bankrupt, Crypto.com carried out major layoffs, and Coinbase ended up spending most of the year in court and settling a major case over the company’s alleged lack of anti-money-laundering protocols. By 2023, there were no crypto ads on Super Bowl Sunday. Something similar happened back in 2000 when the Super Bowl was inundated with dot-com company ads, only for the bottom to fall out on the industry later that year.