Super Bowl Ads are a little more than a 7 million pat on the back

$7 million for a 30-second spot. That’s $233k per second.

That’s the sum that some brands paid to deliver a 30-second ad during Super Bowl LII this Sunday, to an estimated audience of about 103 million viewers (which was the lowest ratings since 2009 for NFL big game).

This seems an incredible waste of money when you look at it from the cost-per-second. On the cost-per-impression, where talking for $0,067 per viewer or a CPM of about $67, which seems to be a wiser investment — but barely. And that’s assuming that all the viewers watched the ad, they’re part of the target audience and are even interested in the brand or product in question.

Anyway, whether you look for the gross-spending, the cost-per-second or the cost-per-viewer, you might wonder why brands don’t spend their money on another type of campaigns that could grant them more engagement and attention for the same amount, or less. Especially when you take into account that Super Bowl ads aren’t particularly good at driving sales.

But that’s missing part of the point. The $7 million price tag should be evaluated not as the price of running a regular TV ad, but as the admission ticket brands buy to be part of a cultural phenomenon. More than driving sales, Super Bowl ads are meant to drive brand-equity and conversation and are the opportunity for new brands to establish themselves or old brands to reignite a conversation with customers.

When we analyze the cost of a Super Bowl ad — and usually the price of producing it is left, wrongly, out of the equation — we have to look also for all the things that goes with it: the pre-game launches and trailers, the news coverage of the ads that will be presented, the ones that aren’t allowed, the rankings and ratings during and after the game, the analysis of experts and amateurs alike, the online views, and the conversations that sprung about them.

That’s the true value of a Super Bowl investment: that for a tiny fraction of time a 30-second ad is analyzed as if it was an Oscar-nominee movie. When brands become actors and a part of a popular culture, and agencies can dare to create truly entertaining commercials that are made to be enjoyed and not to persuade consumers of the wonderful benefits of the latest lemon-scented bathroom cleaning product.

On any given Super Bowl Sunday, any brand — with a lot of money to splash — can be a rockstar.