See it and Sell it First at ASI Show Orlando – January 4-6, 2025.   Register Now.

Strategy

How Many Promo Products Can a Super Bowl Ad Buy?

Instead of spending $5.6 million on a 30-second ad, look how many baseball caps Doritos could give out.

Although television ad rates are dropping, there’s still one broadcast that commands a hefty price tag: the Super Bowl.

After all, the big game is the most watched TV show every year. Last year’s Super Bowl averaged 98.3 million viewers, with 149 million people tuned into at least six minutes of the big game, Forbes reported. The average household rating was 41.1 – the last program to average a household rating of 40+ that wasn’t a Super Bowl was the Seinfeld finale in May 1998.

In such a fragmented media landscape, the Super Bowl is the last bastion for the United States to gather and watch something at the same time. Thus, it’s easy to see why Fox is charging a record $5.6 million for a 30-second commercial during Super Bowl LIV, Business Insider reported.

But what if those companies allocated their marketing budget in a different way? Perhaps, a form of advertising that’s tangible, useful and has longer-lasting impact.

We’ve chosen eight high-profile brands advertising during the Super Bowl and determined how many of a certain promo product they could give out by spending $5.6 million. For each product, we picked five random suppliers and took the average of their end-quantity pricing. Then, we divided 5.6 million by the average cost of the product.

In the following infographics, each product represents 100,000 and each sliced product represents the remainder.

Below are the jaw-dropping amounts:

Bud Light Bottle Openers

Coke Bottles

Doritos Hats

Facebook Power Banks

Hyundai Key Chains

New York Life Pens

Olay Tote Bags

Verizon Phone Wallet