This Sunday’s Super Bowl LX will air on NBC and Telemundo and stream on Peacock and in Canada on TSN, CTV, Crave and RDS. The NFL championship, to be played at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA, is between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. The game is scheduled to kick off at 6:30p.m. ET. Puerto Rican singer and rapper Bad Bunny will headline the halftime show, which will likely begin between 8-8:30 p.m.
Last year’s Super Bowl 59, between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs, was the most-watched single network telecast in television history. According to Nielsen, an average minute audience of 127.7 million viewers watched the game in the US on FOX, FOX Deportes and Telemundo and streamed on Tubi. The previous record was set the year before.
In Canada, the Super Bowl audience fell 15 per cent to 8.5 million viewers on TSN, CTV and RDS. The year before a record 10 million watched in Canada. Why the slip in audience numbers north of the border? With the game played just two weeks after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, some viewers north of the 49th parrallel may already have been turned off by the “51st State” rhetoric emanating from the White House. All those red, white and blue fly pasts and other God Bless America hoopla likely did not play as well to folks who already had their elbows up.
Politics aside, a recent survey by the MX8 Labs, an AI-based market research platform with offices in New York and London, found that most viewers still watch to see the game. According to their finding posted on The Measure, however, right behind the on-field action is the other big draw: the party.
Only a quarter of those responding indicated that they watch because they are fans of the two participating teams. That likely drops even further in Canada where there is no home team favourite, although Seattle’s team likely has fans in Vancouver.
The other interesting finding for me anyway is the trend towards stuffing as many celebrities as possible into Super Bowl ads. According to MX8 Labs, celebrities have appeared in at least 65 per cent of Super Bowl spots every year since 2020. There is also a trend towards cast reunion ads evoking feelings of nostalgia. Last year, more than half of the game ads featured more than one celebrity.
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This Sunday, look for ads from Dunkin’, Uber Eats, and Xfinity featuring this “celebrity reunion” approach. According to The Measure, Dunkin’ (as in Donuts, America’s Tim Hortons) has an ad featuring former “Must See” stars Matt LeBlanc and Jennifer Aniston from Friends alongside Ben Affleck and Jason Alexander. A T-Mobile ad will reunite The Backstreet Boys. The Uber Eats ad stars Bradley Cooper, Matthew McConaughey,and Parker Posey. The Xfinity ad asks what if the dinosaurs never escaped on the first “Jurasic Park” movie with stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum reunited on vacation.
Viewers will notice that Neill and the others look, well, 33 years younger (dating back to when the movie was released). A lot of that seems to have been achieved with wigs and makeup, and good to see Neill, now 78 and diagnosed with a treatable form of blood cancer a few years ago, looking so well.
Beyond the wigs and makeup, was there a little AI-generated de-aging? Perhaps, but that is another finding MX8 Labs recently noted: a big uptick in the number of AI-generated imaging in all television advertising.
