Tide removed a recent stain from its brand on Sunday — but all of those Super Bowl LII ads cost parent company Procter & Gamble a pretty penny to pull that off.
Airing 90 seconds of TV spots and 10 seconds of billboards, the laundry detergent brand dropped tens of millions of dollars last night in order to shift the conversation from kids (and stupid adults) eating Tide Pods to David Harbour (“Stranger Things”) hilariously noting every Super Bowl commercial is actually a Tide ad. The campaign was successful — but just how costly was it?
With 100 seconds flat of television time during the Super Bowl, the cost calculation isn’t so tough. This year, NBC charged $5-plus million for a 30-second Super Bowl ad, on average. If we go with just $5 million, even for the low-end, you’re talking a cost of $167,000 per second. Extrapolate that over 100 seconds and Tide just got a $16.667 million bill from NBC.
And that’s the low-end. It also only represents the cost for the actual airtime — these commercials and their celebrity endorsements cost millions of dollars more to make happen. Here is the point in the post where we tell you that neither Tide nor NBC Sports would tell us just how much the brand spent on Super Bowl LII advertisements.
Considering some 30-second slots sold for $5.5 million per, Tide’s bill from NBC could be as high as $18.333 million. But in reality, if the Procter & Gamble brand got in early and bought in bulk, the company’s itemized all-in receipt probably didn’t sum to that ceiling.
Oh, and Tide wasn’t the only P&G brand to air ads during Super Bowl LII. Febreze also ran a 30-second spot — so add $5 million more to the umbrella corporation’s tally. No wonder shares of its stock are trading down this morning. (OK, just like 50 cents per share, but still.)