Fox Nears Sell-Out of Super Bowl Ads Before End of Summer

Fox Corp. is on the verge of scoring a massive touchdown for Super Bowl LIX, even though kickoff is a little less than half a year away.

The company, which is slated to broadcast the 2025 Super Bowl from Caesars Superdome in New Orleans on February 9, has sold out all but a handful of slots of commercial inventory, according to three media buyers familiar with recent negotiations. These executives suggest Fox is using the heavy demand for the event to seek more than $7 million for a 30-second commercial and is insisting that anyone who wants a berth on the Super Bowl ad roster commit to an advertising package that includes other Fox properties to seal the deal. One area of importance to Fox sales executives, according to one of the buyers, is lining up ad support for its telecasts of post-season Major League Baseball.

Such a move largely closes off the remaining commercials from a significant category of Super Bowl sponsor — unknown entrepreneurs that often try their hand at the Big Game to generate interest for under-the-radar products and services. In the past, these marketers have included companies like GoDaddy, a provider of back-end web services, or Farmer’s Dog, a maker of fresh pet food.

“Is there room for a bigger shop that already has units” in the game? asks one buyer. “Yes. One-offs — no chance.” TV networks showing the Super Bowl often seek a so-called “match” from advertisers, part of an effort to weed out bidders that may not be as serious about participation and to gain more support for other programming.

Fox declined to make executives available for comment.

No TV network likes to announce sell-out too early in the process. After all, a TV sales team may unexpectedly find itself contending with a reversal of fortune if the economy goes south. Most Super Bowl sales processes bring with them interesting hiccups, including pleas from advertisers who get cold feet due to the high price of sponsoring the event, or because they can’t come up with a commercial that gives them confidence.

Even so, the pace to sell-out appears to be an accelerated one, according to buyers, one of whom projected that Fox could in fact declare that it has signed up sponsors for all its Super Bowl inventory by September. CBS, which aired this year’s Super Bowl LVIII, didn’t declare the event all sold until November of last year. And, in a cautionary tale, Fox saw intense demand for 2023’s Super Bowl LVII in the preceding year’s “upfront” market, when TV networks try to win advance ad commitments for their next cycle of programs. But worries about the economy surged in the fall, and the network had to work for months to unload the last 5% of its Big Game inventory. Fox didn’t declare sell-out until just a few days before the game.

And while more advertisers are moving dollars out of traditional TV, the Super Bowl is hard to ignore — even in an era when the NFL has increased cheaper, regular-season inventory through Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football” and “Black Friday” games. An estimated 123.7 million viewers watched Super Bowl LVIII on Feb. 11, according to Nielsen, when the Kansas City Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers in a rare overtime segment. CBS’ broadcast drew an average of 120.3 million viewers — the largest single-network audience for the event. An additional 2.3 million viewers watched the Spanish-language broadcast on Univision, and 1.2 million viewed a kids’ version of the broadcast that appeared on Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite.

Demand for the next Super Bowl in 2025 is so robust that Fox has gone to the NFL to seek the potential approval of a “floating” commercial break, according to two people familiar with the matter, that would allow it to accommodate more advertising. Fox did something similar for its 2020 broadcast of Super Bowl LIV, securing the league’s approval for an additional commercial interruption that would feature two 60-second ads. Fox won approval after selling out its ad inventory and continuing to get requests from advertisers interested in getting into the game — something it seems likely to experience in weeks to come.