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The Kansas City Chiefs hoisted the Lombardi Trophy, but there were also many winners among the advertisers and sponsors in this year’s Super Bowl.
For the second year, Bain Media Lab and artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Hive collaborated to analyze marketing within and around the Super Bowl, using Mensio, an AI-powered television advertising and sponsorship analytics platform developed in partnership between Bain and Hive.
Super Bowl Advertising: How Brands Competed for Attention
Here are the highlights from next-day analysis of the commercials and sponsorships within TV advertising’s biggest event.
For advertisers, the price of entry was steeper than ever—as much as $5.6 million for a 30-second ad—but the exposure was broad. Everyone knows that Super Bowl ads are special because they reach a uniquely large live audience; many marketers also believe that the Super Bowl audience is more engaged. Using data from TVision, a company focused on measuring how viewers engage with television content, we confirmed this by applying computer vision technology to viewers' behavior during the 2019–2020 NFL season and yesterday's finale.
This year’s Super Bowl ads achieved a 2.6 times greater share of eyes-on-screen attention compared with commercials during regular season NFL games.
While Super Bowl commercials may dominate the water cooler talk this week, official league and broadcast sponsors also received significant time on screen during yesterday’s Super Bowl through signage, product placements and digital billboards visible during the telecast.
Using Hive’s proprietary logo detection model, which is programmed to detect exposure for more than 4,000 brands with more than 200 million individual pieces of human-labeled training data, we measured the quantity and quality of logo placements during the television broadcast of the game and halftime show.
Consistent with last year’s Super Bowl, the three most exposed brands were NIKE, Bose and Pepsi. NIKE, the NFL’s uniform and on-field apparel supplier, logged more than 45 minutes of cumulative Super Bowl screen time, with swooshes visible on uniforms, cleats and other sideline apparel. Gatorade’s exposure grew the most year over year, tallying 3 minutes and 12 seconds on camera in Super Bowl LIV—spread across bottles, cups, coolers and towels—surging from 1 minute and 20 seconds of screen time during last year’s big game.
In total, 11 brands surpassed 30 seconds of cumulative brand exposure during the Super Bowl LIV telecast, not including the pregame show and excluding league, team and network brands.
Dan Calpin is president of Hive Media and a senior advisor with Bain & Company. Dan is based in Los Angeles, and he was a founding partner of Bain Media Lab. Laura Beaudin leads Bain’s Global Marketing Excellence practice, and she is based in San Francisco. Andre James leads Bain's Global Media & Entertainment practice. Andre is based in Los Angeles, and he was also a founding partner of Bain Media Lab. Sharona Sankar-King is a senior leader with Bain’s Customer Strategy & Marketing practice, and she is based in New York.
Hive is an AI company that specializes in computer vision and deep learning, focusing on empowering innovators across industries with practical AI solutions and data labeling. For more information, visit thehive.ai.
TVision is a performance metrics company that focuses on measuring how viewers engage with television content. For more information, visit www.tvisioninsights.com.
Note: Published Bain Media Lab research relies solely on third-party data sources and is independent of any data or input from clients of Bain & Company.