Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Once a year, the American people celebrate the Spring Festival Gala.

The annual NFL Finals, also known as the Super Bowl, has been an informal holiday for the American people for 57 years since 1966. Since 2004, the Finals have been played on the first Sunday of February each year. On this day, Americans usually get together over beer, pizza and fried chicken and watch a ball on a big TV. It is also the day Americans eat the most after Thanksgiving.

Because of this, the Super Bowl is the absolute ratings crown in the United States, far exceeding all other TV programs. It is no exaggeration to call it "American Spring Festival Gala." In the United States, with a population of 350 million, the Super Bowl has attracted an average of more than 100 million viewers per year over the past decade, compared with 25.62 million viewers for the World Cup finals in 2022.

This year's Super Bowl 57 was held in Glendale, Arizona, and the Kansas City Chiefs defeated the Philadelphia Eagles 38 - 35 to win the third Lombardi Cup in franchise history. State Farm Stadium, which can accommodate 70,000 people, costs $6000 at the cheapest and more than $40,000 at the most expensive.

Such top-stream competitions are naturally the most commercially valuable. The four most popular sports leagues in the United States, ranked by business value, are American Football NFL, Baseball MLB, Basketball NBA and Ice Hockey NHL. The NFL's total revenue in 2022 is as high as $18 billion, compared with $10.8 billion for MLB,$10 billion for NBA and $6.1 billion for NHL. And football, the world's No. 1 sport, doesn't even rank in the top four in the United States, and MLS revenue is less than a fraction of NFL revenue.

In 2021, the NFL signed 11 seasons worth $113 billion with major media groups. It is worth mentioning that, in addition to CBS, FOX, NBC, Disney (including ESPN and ABC channels) and other traditional sports broadcast giants, streaming giant Amazon also joined the NFL broadcast group for the first time. Amazon also won exclusive rights to Thursday night's game, the first time a streaming platform has received exclusive rights to broadcast. Apple also joined the race for broadcast rights at one point, but eventually chose another track.

The Super Bowl is also a feast for commercial advertising, and advertising costs rise every year. TV stations pay sky-high prices to obtain broadcast rights, naturally to maximize returns. NBC, which televised the Super Bowl last year, charged $6.5 million for a 30-second commercial and grossed more than $578 million in advertising. Fox's 30-second ad for this year's super bowl hit an all-time high of $7 million, or $230,000 per second, and sold out last month.

The highest ratings, the highest advertising costs, of course, are high investment expectations of high returns. Brands that spend huge sums of money every year advertising in the Super Bowl have huge commercial ambitions. TV ads for the Super Bowl each year not only reach hundreds of millions of viewers directly, but also become the focus of Social networks and media coverage, giving advertisers greater exposure in the future.

So what are the big winners at this year's Super Bowl?

Apple Disney shines through.

This year is Disney's centennial. The media giant has just gone through a management shake-up, and legendary CEO Bob Iger is back on the scene, aiming to bring Disney back to a content-centric track. Advertising Disney's content assets at the Super Bowl clearly fits well with Eager's content-centric strategy.

Disney, which just announced 7000 layoffs and $5.5 billion in cost savings, spent more than $20 million to buy 90-second focus ads at this year's Super Bowl, reviewing its centennial history and many of its legacy works such as Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, Lion King, Star Wars and Frozen, and promoting upcoming new films. According to data firm Edo, Disney's ad had the highest impression of any Super Bowl ad, 24 times the average impression of any other Super Bowl ad.

Apple and Amazon, two tech giants, have also become the focus of this year's Super Bowl. It is worth mentioning that Apple and the Super Bowl have good memories. Their most successful advertisement "1984" was placed on the Super Bowl that year, marking the official challenge of Apple Mackintosh computer to industry giant IBM.

But instead of buying Super Bowl ads directly this time, Apple became the exclusive sponsor of another symbol of the Super Bowl-the halftime show. The halftime show was the most popular Super Bowl moment, and almost all the divas were proud to perform at halftime. Michael Jackson's performance at the 1993 halftime show was the most classic moment of the game.

Last September, the NFL officially announced Apple as the new sponsor of the Super Bowl halftime show, replacing Pepsi, which had sponsored the show for the past decade. Tor Myhren, Apple's vice president of marketing, said of the partnership,"We had almost no hesitation [after the Pepsi contract expired]. Apple and the NFL had only one conversation and it was done. "The price of Apple's five-year sponsorship deal is $250 million.

This year's Super Bowl, Apple Music became the exclusive sponsor of the halftime show, inviting pop diva Rihanna to perform. The singer from Barbados, dressed in red and pregnant with her second child, sang several classic songs in succession. Behind Rihanna's performance, Apple Music's Logo is everywhere, earning popularity.

It is worth mentioning that Rihanna has previously rejected Super Bowl midfield invitations twice in 2018 and 2019 in support of NFL exile Colin Kaepernick. Kapenik lost his chance to continue playing because he knelt down in the stadium to protest racial discrimination in American society and was boycotted by NFL teams during Trump's administration. This year was also Rihanna's first live performance in five years. Rihanna's performance also helped boost viewership for this year's Super Bowl, which is expected to reach more than 115 million people this year.

An interesting change in the cryptocurrency industry is that many cryptocurrency companies that invested heavily in advertising last year have disappeared completely this year. This is mainly because Fox TV made a "not difficult" decision to refuse to accept advertising from cryptocurrency companies. Because Super Bowl ads always sell well, blackmailing the cryptocurrency industry doesn't cost Fox anything.

The cryptocurrency industry was a super financier of Super Bowl ads last year. Upstarts such as FTX, Coinbase, Crypto and eToro spent a total of $54 million buying Super Bowl ads just to attract new users into the cryptocurrency industry and boost investor confidence in the regulatory cloud.

It has to be mentioned that Coinbase, an encrypted currency trading platform, spent $14 million last year on a one-minute "boring" Super Bowl ad that showed only a QR code for a registered platform. As long as users sign up, they can get $15 worth of bitcoins. Coinbase even crashed for a while because of the large number of users landing on the site after the ads were played.

However, in the past 2022, the cryptocurrency industry has experienced a series of scandals and crashes, from the Terra (Luna) coin crash at the beginning of the year to the FTX exchange's fraud scandal involving the misappropriation of billions of dollars of customer funds at the end of the year. Investor confidence in this industry has fallen to the bottom, and several key figures have become the target of regulatory investigations and prosecutions.

The FTX crash was the direct cause of the Super Bowl's blackening of the cryptocurrency industry. According to Fox Vice President of Advertising Sales Mark Evans, two cryptocurrency companies had purchased Super Bowl ads before the FTX crash, but after the FTX scandal came to light and the founders were indicted for fraud, Fox decided decisively to close the door on the entire cryptocurrency industry.

Comprehensive transformation of automobile enterprises into electrification

In the history of Super Bowl advertising, rich car companies have always been the most invested manufacturers. The Super Bowl, watched by hundreds of millions of consumers, is also the best platform for car companies to advertise new cars. Compared with previous years, when many car companies spent a lot of money on Super Bowl, this year's auto manufacturers spent a lot less advertising, perhaps because the shadow of the recession has affected the marketing budgets of auto manufacturers. Car owners who used to spend a lot of money have tightened their advertising budgets this year. BMW, Nissan, Toyota and Hyundai collectively missed Super Bowl ads this year.

Stellantis, General Motors and Kia are the big money makers of car advertising in Super Bowl 2023. Stellantis spent $28 million to become this year's ad champion, while GM and Kia each spent $14 million. Stellantis, formerly Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot.

Electrification is the common label for this year's Super Bowl car ads. Stellantis 'main model at the super bowl is the Jeep Wrangler 4xe, a plug-in hybrid SUV; it's one of the hottest hybrid suvs of the year and already accounts for nearly a quarter of wrangler sales. Stellantis also purchased a 60-second ad announcing the electrification of its Ram electric pickup brand.

It is worth mentioning that Olivier Francois, chief marketing officer of Stellantis, is a senior planning expert for Super Bowl advertising. In 2011, he hired rapper Eminem to advertise the Chrysler 200 sedan and launch it at the Super Bowl. In the years that followed, he invited top artists like Clint Eastwood, Bob Dylan, and Oprah Winfrey to run ads at the Super Bowl.

Stellantis is willing to spend tens of millions of dollars on Ram electric pickup trucks, which is also intended to enter the increasingly competitive field of electric pickup trucks. Pickups are a long-standing segment of the U.S. auto market, with many manufacturers launching their own electric pickup trucks, including the GMC Hummer electric pickup truck, Rivian R1T, Ford F-150 Lightning electric, Chevrolet Silberado EV, and of course Tesla CyberTruck, which has been released for many years but has not yet been mass-produced. Ford F-150 Lightning electric has been on sale, with sales exceeding 13,000 units in the second half of last year.

GM teamed up with Netflix to launch its own 60-second ad,"Why Don't Buy an Electric Car," inviting actor Will Ferrell to guest star in Netflix's "Squid Game" and other popular U.S. drama scenes, showcasing electric versions of its GMC Hummer EV, Sierra EV, Chevrolet Blazer EV, Chevrolet Silverado EV, Cadillac Lyrig and many other models.

Tesla black ads on the list

Another car manufacturer that made it to the Super Bowl was Tesla, but Musk didn't invest a penny because it was a black ad. In this "smear ad," a Tesla Model 3 under the control of FSD has a series of serious violations of traffic rules and even pedestrian safety, including a child model that runs straight into the road, ignores the "No Pass" sign, and illegally overtakes a school bus flashing red lights. Many scenes are shocking.

The ad comes from The Dawn project, founded by Dan o'dowd, ceo of Green Hills software, a california-based software company. He is also Tesla's biggest opponent, spending millions of dollars to advertise the safety hazards of Tesla's FSD fully automated driving system across the United States.

O'Dowd explained that his goal was to make computers safer for humans, and Tesla knew that its FSD software might have these security risks, but continued to push FSD services to 400,000 car owners in North America. The ad was designed to call on U.S. regulators to take immediate action to ban Tesla FSD from public roads.

Last Thanksgiving, on the day Tesla announced FSD service to North American car owners, a Tesla suddenly slowed down and stopped in the fast lane of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, triggering an eight-car pile-up accident that injured nine people. The US Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is currently investigating and confirms that Tesla, which caused the accident, was in FSD mode at the time.

Despite the "black ads," Musk doesn't seem to care. After appearing in the World Cup final, Musk came to the scene again to watch the game. He sat in the stands with News Corp founder and CEO Murdoch, eating fast food, chatting and watching the game. Tesla shares closed down slightly 1.1% on Monday, with a market value of $616 billion, and did not seem to be directly affected by "black advertising."

Fight for more and throw thousands of dollars

After the Super Bowl, a mysterious startup became a hot topic in the United States, even appearing in Time magazine and Wall Street Journal. Temu, a four-month-old e-commerce platform, has invested more than $14 million to buy 30-second advertising slots for two Super Bowls, attracting the attention of TV viewers across the United States.

The ad shows a curly-haired woman shopping on her mobile phone, swiping the smartphone screen to buy all kinds of fashionable clothes and shoes. The ad dubs "Download Temu app and shop like a billionaire."

Who's Temu? The Wall Street Journal headline asked. Although Temu is headquartered in Boston, they are actually an e-commerce brand that has entered the United States. Although only a few months after its launch, Temu launched heavily on social networking sites in the United States and quickly entered the top of popular e-commerce apps in the US Apple and Google App Store.

Temu has topped 10 million downloads in the U.S. in its first four months, becoming the most downloaded app in the first two weeks of November, according to Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm.

Although it claims to be "billionaire-like shopping," Temu is actually taking a cheap route, with many fashionable women's clothes advertised for less than $10. The price is so favorable, of course, because of the cost advantage of Chinese manufacturing. Like Shein, Temu's clothing products are shipped directly from Chinese warehouses. During last year's Black Five promotion season, Temu's products were even less than a quarter of the price of Amazon's similar products.

However, it is not easy to do cross-border e-commerce in the United States, and a perfect customer service system needs to be established. Temu has a rating of 1.8 out of 5 on BBB, a U.S. consumer review site. Many complaints are about poor product quality and inability to contact customer service.

Temu also launched a new advertising campaign after running Super Bowl ads. They launched a $10 million "Shake & Cheer" campaign in the United States with a 30% discount. Temu also announced its foray into Canada, starting operations in Maple Leaf this month.

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