Do you love commercials during NFL games? Too bad, you’re about to get a whole lot more of them during the NFL playoffs.
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the NFL is allowing CBS, NBC, and Fox to add two more minutes of commercials to their allocation during all playoff games before the Super Bowl. The league agreed to the move at the request of the networks, who said they have already sold most of their ad inventory and felt as though they could make good on the demand that exists for more commercials.
“Due to strong demand from the marketplace, we worked with our broadcast partners to make additional ad units available for postseason games leading up to the Super Bowl,” NFL spokesman Alex Riethmiller told reporters.
That might not sound like a ton of time, but those 120 seconds are worth millions of dollars in extra revenue for each network. A thirty-second commercial in the first round of the playoffs can often run for as much as $1 million while conference championship spots can reach $2 million.
The new commercial inventory will replace one minute of network promos and another minute of game broadcast time. NFL telecasts currently average 36 minutes of advertising time, nine minutes per quarter.
The agreement does not include the Super Bowl, which will be broadcast on CBS on February 7. CBS is currently asking as much as $5.5 million per commercial for that game, per WSJ. Given the interest in similar major events during the pandemic, it’s expected to be a large audience, even by Super Bowl standards. A CBS sales exec told the WSJ that they have “a few spots remaining for the Super Bowl.”
This weekend, CBS and NBC have two Wild Card game broadcasts, while ESPN and Fox each have one.
[WSJ]
