NBCUniversal’s Super Bowl 60 winning streak continues.
After mentioning it on a Puck podcast earlier this month, Mark Marshall, chairman, global advertising and partnerships, NBCUniversal, confirmed to ADWEEK that his team has sold a “handful” of 30-second Super Bowl units for $10 million or more. This marks the first time broadcasters have hit that number in the Big Game.
“While I would love to say it’s brilliant strategy and execution, part of it is just the marketplace demand,” Marshall told ADWEEK. “We did start earlier this year than in years past. There was so much interest in the Super Bowl and the Olympics, so we went to the marketplace earlier with packages that would include both of them.”
Marshall said NBCU was talking with marketers as early as fall 2024 about Super Bowl LX, which airs Feb. 8, and he noted that the inventory became “tighter and tighter” throughout the summer, with increased demand in certain categories such as tech and CPG.
Despite the demand, the NBCU ads president said the company didn’t add additional inventory, keeping the typical number of ad slots, which totals more than 80.
“There just was so much demand against it, and there were just not enough spots for everyone who wanted to be in,” Marshall said. “So the marketplace just drove the pricing up to $10 million-plus over the course of the summer and into the fall.”
Putting additional pressure on the market, more brands were requesting multiple ad units, or 60-second ads, than ever before, with Novartis, Rocket, and OpenAI being just a few of the examples in this year’s Big Game.
“Taking up those two blocks all of a sudden was stressing the capacity that we had pretty early in the system,” Marshall added.
Marshall also cited the company’s multi-sport offerings as a key to success, noting that in 2022, the last time NBCU had the Super Bowl and the Olympics, advertisers who chose a single sport missed reaching millions of viewers.
