This year SuperBowl will have 67 30-second commercial spots throughout its broadcast and will be hosted by NBC Sports for the first time since 1998. According to Dick Ebersol, Chairman of NBC Sports, 12 of this year’s 67 spots have been sold for over $3 million, and the remaining spots are all selling in the “high $2 million dollar” range. The cost of an advertisement in the Super Bowl has quadrupled in the past 20 years, reaching $2.7 million for a 30-second unit in the 2008 game. For the 2009 game, at NBC’s $3 million dollar per-ad-rate, the total in-game ad revenue should exceed $200 million for the first time ever.
A 30-second spot in 1989 cost advertisers an estimated $675,000; creating a total in-game revenue of 35.5 million dollars. That same 30-second spot for last year’s game cost advertisers $2.7 million dollars; creating a total in-game revenue of $186 million dollars.Over the past ten years, the volume of commercial time in the game has been edging upwards even as the price of advertising has become more expensive. Last year’s FOX telecast contained over 44 minutes of network ads, an all-time high.
With this rising trend of Escalating Advertising we must ask ourselves, at what point did the SuperBowl become less about the game and more about the advertising?
According to TNS Media Intelligence, the index of commercial viewers to program viewers was right around 100, indicating that people opted to watch the ads instead of switching the channel; the lowest dip occurring predictably during the post-game show.
Pre-Game 101
First Half of Game 101
Half-Time of Game 99
Second Half of Game 99
Post-Game 85
Avg. Primetime Show 90
This year’s SuperBowl in Tampa, FL is being played at Raymond James Stadium, a stadium with a capacity of 65,857 people. This number, depending on crowd size, is expandable to over 75,000. The highest ever attended SuperBowl was 1980’s SuperBowl in Pasadena, CA – another SuperBowl featuring the Steelers with 103,985 fans in attendance.
In 1992 in Moscow, Russia Billy Graham hald an evangelistic crusade; there 155,000 in his audience.
2,000 years ago, following Jesus’ death and resurrection, one of His disciples, Peter addressed a crowd that you might consider to be a mix of the two groups. It was a clash of the beer-drinking, un-churched SuperBowl crowd and Billy’s Russian Crusade attendees. You can find the story in Acts 2:14-41, but we’re going to specifically look at verses 22-24.
READ ACTS 2:22-24
Jesus, His life, His ministry was marked with power and authority, and Peter was on his team. In Acts 2 Peter finds himself in the middle of a huge crowd. The time was Pentecost and Jerusalem was filled with thousands upon thousands of people. Jesus was gone and Peter and the disciples find themselves waiting on their “coaching instructions”.
After repeated denial, Peter was reinstated by Jesus and found himself in the middle of a major game. In football terms, Peter and the disciples were playing in the SuperBowl. They had spent three years with what would have equated to the craziest, coolest commercials that had ever happened in that area. People raised from the dead, lame people walking, blind people seeing, deaf people hearing. Their ministry was marked with the power of their Franchise owner. Then, the coach, the promised Holy Spirit appears, giving the disciples what they needed for success – guidance.
Peter addressed a crowd, we don’t know of how many thousand, but as a result, over 3,000 men are added to the growing number of Christian believers in the early church.
At the Billy Graham crusade in 1992 one-quarter of the 155,000 people in Billy’s audience came forward upon his request to accept Jesus Christ as Lord of their lives. That equates 38,750 people. If Raymond James Stadium sold out for SuperBowl XLIII and one-quarter of its attendees accepted Jesus Christ, that would add over 16,000 new believers to the Kingdom from just one football game.
The day after the SuperBowl, advertisement buzz is at an all time high. Two days after the game it drops 53%. Three days later the buzz drops another 73%, and four days following the SuperBowl, statistically speaking, commercial conversations have all but been eliminated.
That’s a lot of money to invest for such a short window of opportunity, but companies and investors believe it’s worth it.
Peter and the disciples were given a seemingly impossible task, to go to the ends of the world and preach the gospel. Because they were in God’s place, at God’s time, they were used in ways beyond any capacity they had previously known or experienced.
As you head out from here into your week, ask yourself, what messages are marking my life? What commercials am I communicating? Truly the best is yet to come!