Super Bowl Ads Sell Out Three Months Early, at Record Price

In one of the latest examples of media networks battling for bragging rights, Fox Corp. said it has sold out of its advertising inventory for Super Bowl LIX in February at “record pricing.” 

As part of its fiscal first-quarter earnings report Monday, the Fox Sports parent said its ad units are gone, more than three months before the game.

“We still have a pretty robust football calendar yet to come, culminating with our broadcast of Super Bowl LIX, where we are already sold out and at record pricing,” said Fox CEO and executive chair Lachlan Murdoch.

Fox’s claim of record pricing could be largely a matter of semantics. 

Specific figures have not been released, but sales activity around the game has surpassed a $7 million rate per 30 seconds. That pricing is largely in line with recent years across multiple networks—even as the NFL has assumed a dominant role in U.S. television, and Super Bowl LVIII this past February set an American broadcast record with an average audience of 123.4 million. When the final numbers come out, the price could just be pennies higher than last year—or it could be significantly higher. Either way, Fox gets to claim a record.

In 2023, when Fox last aired the Super Bowl, the network said it generated nearly $600 million in advertising revenue related to the game. CBS Sports parent company Paramount, which aired Super Bowl LVIII, then surpassed that mark, though by exactly how much is not known. 

The broader flattening of the Super Bowl ad market, even with the NFL’s unrivaled popularity, owes to several factors, including the effects of social media, additional buying requirements that most Super Bowl broadcasters impose on brands, and still-rising production costs.