I recently heard a comment that a 30-second spot for advertising during the 2025 Super Bowl was $8 million. In addition to the game-time advertising, Fox Network, which aired the game, also sold pre-game ad slots for about $4.5 million each and post-game ad spots for around $4 million each. Fox sold out its ad inventory early. Some companies, including Busch Light, ran two ads during the game, doubling their costs.
Super Bowl advertising is expensive because the advertiser has the potential to reach about 100 million viewers. While the added revenue generated by these ads is great for the big-name companies that can afford it, I wonder how many people those companies could help by using those funds in another way, especially when I learned their actual bottom-line cost.
In 2025, 57 commercials aired during the game, earning the Fox Network approximately $456 million in game-time advertising revenue. The year 2025 was record-breaking, and the combination of pre-game, game-time, and post-game advertising generated almost $700 million in revenue for the network.
Fox makes that for the advertising spot, but the cost for the companies who advertise is considerably higher, and so is Fox Network’s revenue. The ad agency cost for Super Bowl work is an average of $3 million to $6 million, film production costs are $3 million to $4 million, and post-production work such as visual effects, sound, and editing is around $1 million. Music licensing expenses are between $3.5 million and $5 million.
Those advertising costs do not include the fees that must be paid for the ad spokesperson. A non-celebrity will run about $250,000, a B-list celebrity about $1 million, and a more realistic celebrity appearance is between $3.5 million and $5 million.
In addition to those production and celebrity costs, advertisers need to spend additional funds on digital and social media ads and any additional activations, which adds another $3 million to $10 million to the final cost.
Now, remember that $8 million 30-second ad? Fox Network requires advertisers to commit an additional $8 million for media commercial time for the upcoming year, which means that the 30-second spot is a $16 million commitment.
The final cost for purchasing a Super Bowl Ad is about $40 million per ad. With 57 ads sold during 2025, that works out to about two billion two hundred eighty million dollars ($2,280,000,000).
I realize my thoughts about how that money could be better spent will never materialize because Super Bowl ads generate a lot of revenue for advertising companies. That doesn’t stop me from wondering what would happen if those companies produced low-cost commercials notifying watchers that rather than spend $40 million on creating an advertisement, they spent the minimum advertising contract and created a simple ad to inform consumers they have donated the difference in expenditures, approximately $24 million, to homeless shelters, food banks, soup kitchens, building low-income housing, natural disaster relief, etc.
If you saw an advertisement like that, would it make you more or less inclined to purchase their products? Think how beneficial this type of action could be to the citizens of this country. Making this country great means helping others improve their lifestyle and achieve success. Is a $40 million commercial helping America? Could those funds be used better elsewhere?
As of January 2024, the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported over 771,000 homeless people in the U.S. Reasons for this status include ending COVID-19 relief programs, higher housing costs, and immigration to big cities. People experiencing homelessness include almost 150,000 children under 18.
According to the Working Poor Families Project, 47.5 million people in the U.S. live in low-income working families, including 23.5 million children. In 2011, more than four in 10 working families were low-income working families in Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Mexico. Between 2007 and 2011, low-income working families increased by 5% in Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, and South Carolina. These families spend more than one-third of their income on housing and, in doing so, exceed the accepted guideline for affordable housing.
What are your thoughts? Please comment below.
A prime target has become schools, where firearms are not allowed. By an act of violence upon the innocent the “nobody” — a coward in my eyes because of the venue and victim type he/she chooses — has now become a celebrity. Thanks to mass media the shooter’s photo is displayed on TV and in newspapers across the country repeatedly, video clips of the shooting and aftermath are played again and again. Whether captured or killed, the shooter’s name will go down in history of having done something that made them headline news…a celebrity of sorts, even if for the negative they created.
--- LIFE IS A MELTING POT --- Grace Grogan...Writer, Photographer 