Fox Sells Out Super Bowl Ads at as Much as $5.6 Million Each

(Bloomberg) -- Fox Sports sold out its inventory of Super Bowl ads, with prices for 30-second spots at television’s biggest annual event going for as much as a record $5.6 million.

The Fox Corp. unit finished selling all 77 national spots on Friday, according to Seth Winter, executive vice president for sports sales at Fox Sports. He said most ads for the National Football League championship game tend to sell out around Christmas, or even later into January.

“Clearly the NFL is still the most powerful media platform in all of sports and all of television,” Winter said. “Advertisers have seen the restoration of healthy ratings and an environment that doesn’t create caution on their part, so they’ve dived headfirst into the NFL.”

While single 30-second commercials for the Feb. 2 game in Miami cost $5.6 million, discounts were offered to those that bought more. Every ad sold for more than $5 million, except for one company, whose long-standing bulk order kept its pricing under that threshold, Winter said. Using rough calculations, the total sales figure probably eclipsed $400 million.

The Super Bowl is the most-watched TV event of the year in the U.S., and ad sales typically fluctuate based on the health of the U.S. economy and interest in the NFL. Both factors became tailwinds for Fox during this sales process -- the league’s regular season ratings are up and U.S. stocks have been nearing all-time highs.

Winter said the fractured media landscape was also a benefit. “There just is a dearth of ratings points out there,” he said. “Beyond the Super Bowl, there are very few guarantees, except, again, other postseason football.”

This will be Fox’s ninth Super Bowl broadcast, dating back to its first in 1997. Fox, CBS Corp. and Comcast Corp.’s NBC rotate rights to the game as part of their billion-dollar national broadcast deals.

Trump Ad

President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign agreed to buy one of the slots, according to a report last week from Sports Business Journal. While it’s rare for political campaigns to purchase pricey Super Bowl space, a Trump ad aired during Game 7 of the World Series on Fox, and the campaign has advertised a few times on various Fox NFL games this year.

Winter declined to comment on the Trump campaign’s interest, or more broadly about political ads during the game, which is one day before the Iowa Democratic Caucus.

The NFL and Fox agreed this year to fewer commercial breaks for the Super Bowl, a decision that didn’t change the total number of ads. Fox also has a handful of local spots, sold through a different process, that will air during the game.

To contact the reporters on this story: Eben Novy-Williams in New York at enovywilliam@bloomberg.net;Scott Soshnick in New York at ssoshnick@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Nick Turner at nturner7@bloomberg.net, Linus Chua, Matthew G. Miller

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.