While there might have been a brief uptick in the viewership for recent awards ceremonies, the act of communal live TV watching is still not what it used to be. In the US, the one constant is sport and while weekly games might only appeal to an impassioned subset of fans, the Super Bowl’s broader appeal makes it the most attractive night of the year to advertisers, their big chance to make an impression with an audience that’s typically over 100 million.
It’s also inevitably the most expensive with a 30-second spot costing about $8m this year – a record amount – and so it’s left up to the biggest of the big companies to get involved. On the film side, that translated to just Paramount, Disney, Universal and Warners flashing the cash but was it money well spent?
