Super Bowl LIX is still nights apart, but someone has already scored a crucial Big Game score.
According to two people with knowledge of the situation, Fox Corp. sold at least ten of the advertisement that will be shown on the broadcast of the NFL championship game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles for more than$ 8 million, a record rate for Super Bowl products that demonstrates how significant the celebration has become to Madison Avenue in the streaming time.
The Super Bowl “is the only place where you can index reasonable range with one commercial”, Mark Evans, executive vice president of selling at Fox Sports, said. ” It’s not like any other thing”.
Not too long ago, but, it was. By the end of the last decade, the Super Bowl had entered a more shaky phase where publishers had taken control, and the sale of all the ads could have taken up until just before the start. By obtaining deals for CBS and therefore NBC to weather Thursday Night Football, the NFL had increased its regular-season inventory, allowing advertisers to schedule commercials more often and run ads for less money.

There are just fewer locations for big and small marketers to get large audiences all viewing material at the same time, Evans said as streaming is reworking the economics of conventional Television. According to Evans, a significant portion of TV advertisers are shifting that money into sports from what they once would have put toward primetime programs on cable and even some on broadcast. ” The NFL has benefitted from that”, he said.
Fox, which initially sought around$ 7 million for 30 seconds of Super Bowl ad time, had finished the majority of its Super Bowl LIX inventory in August. Demand persisted even after Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch revealed during the company’s third quarter investor call that all ads had sold out. In fact, a group of sponsors, including State Farm Insurance, requested release from their contracts as a result of the recent California wildfires, and Fox was able to resell their time for higher prices as a result of high interest. Some of that activity may have spurred a portion of the hefty$ 8 million-plus pacts.
Even the Super Bowl telecast advertisements have increased in price. One of the people with whom the matter is familiar with the situation said that 30 seconds of ad time in Fox’s late pre-game coverage cost as much as$ 4.5 million in comparison to previous amounts of$ 2 million. A 30-second ad in Fox’s post-game coverage might go for around$ 4 million, this person said, compared with between$ 2.5 million and$ 3 million in the past.

Fox’s last Super Bowl telecast, in 2023, generated around$ 600 million in total ad revenue tied to the main event and ancillary programming.
Fox will be able to insert some more commercials into the main event. The NFL, which has the final say over how many commercial breaks and ads are shown in the Super Bowl, agreed to let the network add what is thought to be more than five as part of “floating” breaks that might appear after a time out, if a player is injured, or after an unexpected stop to a game play. Fox and the NFL would share revenue from those commercials, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.
The commercials show up in what the NFL calls “flex pods”, Mike North, the league’s vice president of broadcast planning, said. He claimed that these breaks were made to prevent overuse of interruptions in game play. The concept “lets you take advantage of downtime. If you’re lucky, you get to the fourth quarter and maybe eight minutes in the late game and the only break is if it’s the two-minute warning”, he said. ” Now we can just play football, and let the game continue with rapid-fire action and excitement”.
Among the advertisers that have announced their presence in the 2025 game are Anheuser-Busch InBev, PepsiCo, Ferrara Candy Co.’s Nerds, Georgia-Pacific’s Angel Soft, Squarespace and Stellantis. According to Fox’s Evans, viewers can anticipate seeing noticeably fewer automakers release this year, as well as potentially fewer movie studios and streamers.
Fox’s good fortune with the Super Bowl may continue. The event will be broadcast on NBCUniversal in 2026, and the company is likely to try to create packages that include the NBA All-Star Game, the Winter Olympics, and the football spectacular. ” I don’t see it slowing down anytime soon”, Evans said.