By: Ben Pawlak
Feb. 23, 2023
Photo Credit: Associated Press
On Sunday, Feb. 12, 2023, the Kansas City Chiefs emerged victorious in a dramatic 38-35 comeback victory over the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LVII. The game was played at State Farm Stadium (home of the Arizona Cardinals) in Glendale, Arizona in front of 67,827 fans. As fellow SBAJ writer Kaitlin Dandini discussed in her article from last month’s issue, the economic ramifications of the Super Bowl are unlike any other single sporting event in the entire world. With that being said, there’s a reason that the Super Bowl is known as “The Big Game.” Everything - the number of eyeballs glued to their TV screens and the amount of money that’s made (and lost) for the parties involved as a result - is bigger on Super Bowl Sunday.
Super Bowl LVII, By The Numbers:
Fox’s broadcast of Super Bowl LVII became the second most watched program in American television history. In fact, the game averaged 113 million viewers, second only to Super Bowl XLIX between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks on February 1st, 2015.
Fox charged around $7 million for a 30-second Super Bowl commercial. Originally, at least four cryptocurrency-related ads were planning on advertising during the game, but after the bankruptcy of the massive cryptocurrency exchange company FTX in November of 2022, their deals with the NFL were nixed. Notable advertisers include Anheuser-Busch (four total minutes of ads for Michelob Ultra, Bud Light, and Busch Light), Heineken, M&M’s, Doritos, Google Pixel, Amazon Studios, Sony Pictures, Disney, Paramount, and Warner Bros.
Rihanna’s halftime show peaked at 118.7 million viewers. Her halftime show was the first with Apple Music as the NFL’s presenting sponsor of their intermission period. Apple Music and the NFL inked a five year deal worth roughly $50 million per year for those naming rights in September of 2022.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s MARIAH score, a metric implemented to measure the individual star power of every Super Bowl halftime show since 1993, Rihanna is the highest-scoring artist (and therefore the biggest star) to ever perform at a Super Bowl. Her MARIAH score of 9,757 narrowly beat out Usher’s MARIAH of 8,944 from his Super Bowl XLV halftime show in 2011. After Rihanna’s performance, her music saw a 211% increase in on-demand streams and a 390% increase in digital song sales.
Finally, the Super Bowl acknowledged Indigenous peoples for the first time in its illustrious history. The Indigenous peoples of Arizona were named official Host Committee Partners by the NFL in a ceremony attended by the Ak-Chin Indian Community, Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, Gila River Indian Community, and Tohono O'odham Nation. In another respectful gesture, the NFL also commissioned an Indigenous artist to create the official artwork for Super Bowl LVII. The design served as a valuable representation of the prevalence and influence of Native American culture in the state of Arizona.