The following is a guest post from Jason Hershman, founder and fractional CFO of Point. Opinions are the author’s own.
It happens to CFO’s every year around the Super Bowl. Their chief marketing officer walks in and asks, “Can you approve an $8 million marketing line item that disappears in 30 seconds?”
We’ve all heard a similar pitch before. CMOs trot out waving around impression counts, social media mentions and “brand lift” studies that somehow always prove the spend was worth it.
Funny how that works. The study never comes back saying, “Yeah, we lit $8 million on fire.”
And look, $8 million is just the cover charge. That’s what NBC is charging for a single 30-second spot during Super Bowl LX, with a handful of premium slots clearing $10 million. But once you start layering on creative production, celebrity talent, legal and the inevitable post-game digital campaign designed to convert all those eyeballs into something that actually shows up on the top of the P&L, total spend lands somewhere between $15 and $50 million for thirty seconds of airtime.
I’ve greenlit entire go-to-market strategies for less than that and had to fight for every dollar.
The New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks kick off Feb. 8, and I couldn’t care less which ads “win the Super Bowl.” I care whether the numbers hold up once the confetti gets swept off the field.
The “all-in” cost: Why $8M is just the cover charge
Having worked as a CFO in the sports production space, and having supported client campaigns from the finance side, I can tell you this much: Add 50% to the topline production cost from the marketing team. That’s closer to reality.
With respect to Super Bowl ads, the media buy gets the headline: $7 to $8 million for thirty seconds. But the agency and production side runs another $3 to $6 million on its own, and that’s before you cast a celebrity or shoot something ambitious.
Then comes the part everyone conveniently leaves off the slide: The 360 activation spend. Social, influencer, retail media, paid search, retargeting, landing pages, CRM, promo funding. NBCU says digital investment around the Super Bowl is up 20% compared to the last NBC Super Bowl, because nobody runs a Super Bowl ad in isolation anymore.
So before I would sign anything, I would want answers to these four questions:
- What’s the total authorization amount, not just media?
- What are our operational constraints if demand spikes (inventory, call center capacity, app stability)?
- What’s the payback window we’re underwriting: Two weeks, eight weeks, 12 months?
- What’s Plan B if the ad becomes a meme but sales don’t move?
Treat the Super Bowl like a capital project. Give it a budget, an owner and a hurdle rate. Don’t give it a vibe.
What are you buying, exactly? Reach, attention and “intent velocity”
Marketers oversell this part. CFOs undersell it. The truth sits in between.
Super Bowl LIX averaged 127.7 million viewers and reached 191.1 million across platforms. Do the napkin math on a $7.5 million spot, and you land around $59 CPM on the average audience, roughly $39 on total reach. For live, simultaneous, leaned-in attention, that’s not unreasonable.
Where it gets genuinely interesting is the intent spike. EDO found that a single Super Bowl ad generated the same brand-search engagement as 1,056 primetime ads.
One ad.
That compression ratio alone earns a seat at the table. The problem, though, is that 63 ads from 57 advertisers ran during last year’s game, and every single one of them was chasing that same spike. So yes, the Super Bowl delivers real attention. But attention and revenue are not the same line item, and the distance between them is where most campaigns quietly fall apart.
The return on ad spend truth: Break-even math
So the attention is real, and the intent spike is measurable. Great. Now show me the money.
If you want a clean return on ad spend story, the Super Bowl probably isn’t your buy. But if you want a strategic one, you owe it to yourself to crunch the numbers honestly. Here’s how:
Step 1: Define the real investment
The first trick in any Super Bowl budget deck is the number on the cover page. It’ll say $8 million, because that’s the media buy, and it sounds big enough to signal ambition without triggering a panic in the finance department. What it won’t include is the $3 to $6 million in agency and production costs, the activation spend or the digital campaign you’ll need to run for weeks after the game.
A conservative all-in number for most brands lands around $13 million. But many blow way past $25 million before they’ve retargeted a single viewer.
So step one is simple: Kill the fiction that the media buy is the budget. It’s the down payment.
Step 2: Define return like a CFO, not a marketer
Here’s where the conversation usually falls apart.
Marketing will come back with impressions, social mentions and my personal favorite, “earned media value,” which is Wall Street’s least favorite made-up metric. None of that counts.
The only number that matters is incremental contribution profit: Revenue that wouldn’t have existed without the campaign, minus the cost to fulfill it.
You need to stress-test it. How much of that spike is cannibalization from other channels? How much margin did you burn through promo funding to “activate” the moment? How much demand just got pulled forward from Q2? These aren’t “gotcha questions.” They’re the difference between a campaign that worked and a campaign that felt like it worked.
Step 3: Run the break-even and let it humble you
Now, for the part that clears the room. At a 40% contribution margin, your $13 million all-in bet needs $32.5 million in incremental revenue just to break even. At a 20% margin, that number doubles to $65 million. If your average order is $50 and you keep $20 per order, you need 650,000 incremental orders attributed directly to the campaign.
Not total orders that week. Incremental orders.
Fox cited last year’s Super Bowl as the driver behind a 65% jump in quarterly ad revenue, pulling in roughly $800 million from the game. Advertiser demand is clearly alive and well. But advertiser demand and your brand’s payback period are two completely different spreadsheets, and confusing one for the other is how CFOs end up approving bets they can’t explain to the board eight weeks later.
Measurement that won’t get you laughed out of the audit committee
You’ve done the break-even math. It’s humbling. Now you need to prove whether the spend actually moved the needle.
Start with one primary KPI: Incremental contribution profit, with an agreed payback window. Not impressions. Not earned media value. Profit that wouldn’t have existed without the campaign. Then layer in leading indicators that feed that number: Brand search lift, direct traffic, app installs, retailer add-to-cart rates. These won’t prove ROI on their own, but they’ll tell you within 48 hours whether the ad generated real demand or just applause.
The harder part is isolating what the Super Bowl caused versus what would have happened anyway. Geo holdouts solve this. Pick matched markets, suppress spend in a control set and compare the lift over two to six weeks. Stagger your paid search and retail media boosts so you can separate organic demand from the spend you’re layering on top of yourself.
One more thing that finance teams consistently overlook is operational readiness. None of this matters if your site crashes under the traffic spike or your warehouse can’t fulfill the orders. A stockout the week after the Super Bowl turns a winning ad into negative ROAS. EDO’s data shows these ads reliably over-index on mid-funnel intent versus average primetime. The signal will be there. The only question is whether your backend is ready to convert it.
Opportunity cost: What else could $8M buy (and why that argument is both right and wrong)
Every CFO I know has the same reflex when a Super Bowl pitch lands on their desk: “What else could we do with this money?” Good question. Also, an incomplete one.
The receipts are real. According to Digiday’s 2025 breakdown, that same $8 million could buy roughly:
- 1.35 billion TikTok impressions
- 1.6 billion Instagram Reels impressions
- 10 million clicks on Walmart Connect
On pure volume, the Super Bowl loses every time. If your product already wins on performance channels, spending $8 million for thirty seconds of fame is an expensive way to do a job your media team handles in their sleep.
But performance channels can’t manufacture trust overnight. They can’t get a retailer to give you an endcap. They can’t convince a skeptical consumer to try a category they’ve never considered. Some brands need a moment that rewrites how the market sees them, and the Super Bowl remains one of the few stages that can do that in a single night.
So, the honest answer about opportunity cost? Both sides are right.
The CFO who reflexively says no is leaving strategic upside on the table. The CMO who can’t explain why it’s worth it over the alternatives shouldn’t be spending the money. Your job is to figure out which problem the company is solving and fund the option that solves it with the most accountability.
The final whistle: Is it worth it?
For a CFO, evaluating Super Bowl ROAS can feel a bit like the Puppy Bowl: Everyone’s smiling, emotions are running high and by the end, you’re not entirely sure what you just watched — yet you’re expected to agree it was a success.
So let me be clear: Advertising around the Super Bowl can be worth it if you run it like a CFO. Not if you let the marketing team treat it like a trophy.
I’m not here to tell you the Super Bowl is a bad buy. I’m here to tell you it’s a dangerous one when nobody in the room is asking hard questions.
The ROAS can work for high-margin brands with strong LTV, operational readiness to capture the demand spike, and a full-funnel plan that turns thirty seconds into six months of revenue. The problem is that the profile describes maybe a third of the companies writing these checks. The rest are funding an expensive dopamine hit for their marketing department and calling it strategy.
Your CMO will tell you the Super Bowl is worth it. That’s their job. Your job is to make them prove it with a real budget, a real payback window and a scoreboard that goes beyond retweets.
The Super Bowl rewards companies that plan like operators. It punishes the ones who plan like fans.
