What Changed Advertising, TV Broadcasting, and America's Sports Culture All at Once?

A game you may still know almost nothing about: the Super Bowl. Calling it "America's Spring Festival Gala" only scratches the surface.

At 7:30 on the morning of Chinese New Year's Day — 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time on February 7 — San Francisco, California's second-largest city, hosts the 50th Super Bowl, with the Carolina Panthers taking on the Denver Broncos.

Legend has it that nine months after the Super Bowl, the winning team's city sees a baby boom, and the babies are called Super Bowl Babies. By that logic, a Super Bowl Baby born after the first Super Bowl in 1967 turns 50 this year.

It is no exaggeration to call the Super Bowl a game that "Americans grow up with." It is the annual championship game of the National Football League (NFL). By some counts, Americans across the country throw their own parties for it every year, with an average of 17 guests each. On that one day they eat 1.25 billion chicken wings, and the toilets flushed during halftime use 350 million gallons of water — as much as flows over Niagara Falls in seven minutes.

The ticketing site aztickets lists prices for each section of the stadium at Super Bowl 50. The red section is VIP seating, almost impossible to buy through ordinary channels. The pink section is the most expensive, currently averaging about $10,000. Even the green section, at the very top of the stands, costs more than 50 times a stand ticket to the Champions League final. According to AC Nielsen, the Super Bowl draws a rating of 40% to 60%. In 2008, 130 million Americans watched it — more than voted in that year's presidential election.

Americans love it so much that the list of the most-watched programs in U.S. TV history is essentially a contest among past Super Bowls. Last year's game again set the record for the year — and second and third place went to the post-game and pre-game shows.

An audience that size makes sponsors glad to spend. To appear on the NFL, Nike pays $220 million a year, about one-fifteenth of its annual marketing budget. Whether a brand can afford a 30-second Super Bowl spot has become a sign of its wealth and standing.

The Super Bowl is the most lucrative sporting event in the world, bar none. You have probably heard it called "America's Spring Festival Gala," but that is only the tip of the iceberg.

How Did the Super Bowl Shape American Sports Culture?

Why are so many Americans crazy about football, a sport that looks so violent? Liu Zhuxi, a longtime NFL fan, argues that it is precisely because the game is violent that it puts so much weight on restraint. You can only play it well within tight limits, which makes it a very modern sport.

The history of the rules bears this out. In the mid-19th century, the game, which grew out of English football, still had no settled rules. And unlike baseball, American football was played by college students — the elite. In the early 20th century, a string of student deaths on the field forced the rules to change.

Look at the modern game: 60 minutes split into four quarters, each with a two-minute break. This precise sense of time gives football an unmistakably industrial feel. It breaks the offense into a series of tasks, and each of a team's 11 players has a strictly defined position and assignment. In Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford wrote that the clock on the tower almost marked the very existence of the city. Football, a pastime that only the middle class could then enjoy, bears the same stamp.

Compare the NBA, which you may know better. Look back at how the NBA caught on in America and it is clear that the league was ruled by Black players and Black subculture. The 1960s and 1970s, when racial conflict in America reached its peak, were also the years the NBA rose to become a top-tier league.

Black Americans who won status through their athletic gifts kept pushing a marginalized subculture into the American mainstream, until mainstream society came to accept Black culture fairly widely, as it does today.

Football is different. It was labeled "elite" almost from the start. Still, every competitive sport has its rival camps, and football has its own distinctly American feuds. Take neighboring Oklahoma and Texas: the first settlers to stake claims in Oklahoma were called "Sooners," and the game between the two states' university teams became known as the "Red River Shootout." Missouri and Kansas are the same: the old conflict between slave state and free state makes their games especially combustible.

Once games were on television, viewers could watch documentaries before kickoff that laid out the two teams' long-running grudges. Over its history the NFL invented plenty of such showbiz tricks. And the Super Bowl became a commercial success precisely because television itself was booming.

How Did the Super Bowl Change TV Broadcasting?

It was television that brought football to the masses. In 1973 Time magazine wrote: "Without the camera, American football would have stayed confined to the colleges and the notes of historians. Television made the game an important part of the entertainment industry."

After World War II, the TV set became standard in American homes; by 1955, half of all households had one. Huge numbers of veterans came home, married, and had children. Television met their need for entertainment, and broadcasting sports looked like a good bet. In 1955, the NFL signed its first contract with NBC (the National Broadcasting Company).

But in the early 1950s, football was nowhere near as popular as baseball, the national pastime, and the NFL earned far less from broadcasting than college football did. Which brings us to the NFL's seventh league chief, Pete Rozelle.

Rozelle took over at 33, after his predecessor died suddenly. He saw how much television — the "new media" of its day — could do for the NFL. In his second year in office, he persuaded Congress to pass the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, a law vital to the league's growth. It let the league sell the whole season's broadcast rights as a package on behalf of all its teams, with every team sharing the money equally, without running afoul of antitrust law.

The hard part was that if every team got the same money, big clubs like the New York Giants lost out. Rozelle lobbied the act through anyway, and the payoff was that small teams got a chance to grow. Anyone could win, so the games stayed worth watching. In the 2014–2015 season, for example, the NFL took in $9.5 billion, and it shares broadcast revenue, national sponsorships, one-third of ticket revenue, and about 10% of merchandise sales equally among its 32 teams. That is why many people call the NFL a communist league.

The "AFL" (American Football League) appeared around the same time. In 1960 the newly founded AFL began broadcasting its games with ABC, which was not yet a national network. To compete with the NFL, the AFL made many changes to suit television, such as brighter jerseys and movable camera positions along the field. Before long, though, in 1966, the AFL merged with the NFL to form a new NFL. CBS and NBC paid $9.5 million for four years of Super Bowl broadcast rights.

To make games better to watch on TV, the NFL also adopted one broadcast innovation after another: instant replay, better on-field sound, and more. To help new fans follow the rules, for instance, broadcasters needed clearer on-screen graphics, and so came the Graphic System (also called 1st & Ten). It debuted on ESPN broadcasts in 1988, overlaying the down and the yards to go on the screen at the snap.

Beyond its machismo, football on TV became a mainstay of American party culture, especially at family gatherings. Compared with other sports broadcasts, a football game is highly fragmented, broken up by long stretches of ads, substitutions, lining up, and other preparation. As a viewer, your attention can drift and relax yet snap back to the field at any moment. That suits friends and family chatting together while still caring about the game.

That is how baseball lost to football. Besides lagging in TV promotion, baseball on screen was far less gripping than football's hand-to-hand combat; its thrills and tension did not come across on television. Football long ago stopped being just a sport and became an entertainment show for Americans — one far more people watch than play.

Along the way, two of America's big broadcast networks, ABC and FOX, gained enormously; winning NFL rights is still seen as the turning point in FOX's rise. Today NFL rights are so expensive that no single network can afford them alone. Last season, the fees from FOX, CBS, NBC and others, plus the league's earlier four-year, $4 billion deal with DirecTV, pushed NFL revenue up 21% to $9.5 billion.

If we treat the NFL as a company (in fact it has long been a nonprofit), this league of 32 teams is worth about $46 billion, which would place it near the world's top 100. By revenue, though, it would rank only somewhere beyond 200th. That gap shows the advantage of the NFL's "limited-edition product": a season only five months long, capped by the Super Bowl, which works like the finale of a hit TV series. Forbes puts the Super Bowl's commercial value at around $470 million — more than the Olympics and the World Cup combined.

The NFL's core product is the game. From it come four revenue streams: tickets, broadcast rights, advertising and sponsorship, and merchandise. To keep those numbers growing, the league must keep winning fans, so Americans have turned the NFL into a sports business built almost entirely on entertainment. Nowhere is this clearer than at the Super Bowl.

Consider these numbers: players on the losing Super Bowl team earn $46,000 each, and players on the winning team earn $92,000 for one game. The halftime performers earn nothing.

And those performers are all superstars: Katy Perry last year, Bruno Mars the year before. Nearly every big name in American pop has played this stage — Madonna, U2, and, at the 1993 game in which the Dallas Cowboys beat the Buffalo Bills, the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson, who sang his classic Heal the World live surrounded by 3,500 children and teenagers. After his halftime show, Bruno Mars's album sales jumped 164%, and three of his singles shot straight onto the Billboard charts.

That is why pop stars will perform for free. The halftime show is billed as a barometer of global entertainment and a mark of status — the same pull the Spring Festival Gala has on Chinese entertainers, except that at the Super Bowl nobody lip-syncs. This year's headliner is Coldplay, and the lead singer says the band will strike while the iron is hot, following up with a U.S. tour to turn the halftime show's exposure into ticket sales.

"The halftime show was Pete Rozelle's idea," former NFL executive Jim Steeg once said. "He understood that we couldn't count on every Super Bowl being a close game, 20–19. You had to be ready for 55–17."

In the 1970s and 1980s, few companies could stage a halftime show at a sporting event, and Disney was the obvious choice. With Disney running it, the show became a spectacle. Because it is staged on the stadium turf in a tight halftime window, every show tests the props, sound, lighting, pyrotechnics, choreography and set design: the crew has to build or strike an entire stage within 25 minutes, and still make it dazzling. The NFL did not seem worried that anything would go wrong, because Disney used the halftime show to advertise its theme parks. Look — a company that can put on a show like this can surely build a dreamland for your kids.

The Show That Rewrote Advertising

Advertising revenue is another measure of the Super Bowl's commercial value. In 2015, Super Bowl ad revenue reached $350 million. According to a Forbes report, about 50% of viewers watch the Super Bowl for the commercials.

The game's staggering ratings make brands willing to pay staggering prices. This year a 30-second Super Bowl spot sells for $5 million, about 32.85 million yuan. And since brands now tend to buy 60 seconds to tell a longer story, the bill doubles. AB InBev ran 210 seconds of ads in total last year; at 2014 prices, that came to $31.5 million.

Ad Age, the leading advertising trade publication, has tracked and covered Super Bowl ads every year since 2004. In the social-media era that followed, most sponsors began releasing 15-second teasers of their Super Bowl ads months ahead to build buzz online.

Sixty-second ads used to be oddities. Apple's Macintosh ad at the 1984 Super Bowl broke that rule, and its thought-provoking message broke with the jokey style that had dominated before. It became one of the most celebrated ads in history, and 60 seconds went on to become a standard length for a TV commercial.

If the halftime show is a barometer of entertainment, Super Bowl ads are a barometer of the American economy and society.

In 2000, 16 companies with ".com" in their names advertised during the Super Bowl. The next year, the number plunged to three. The best-known of them, pets.com, went bankrupt within 10 months as the dot-com bubble burst.

Then came the subprime crisis. Ameriquest, then the largest subprime mortgage lender in the U.S., advertised during the Super Bowl in 2005 and 2006. By 2007 it had been bought by Citigroup.

Ad prices keep climbing, and every year before kickoff the press argues all over again about whether the money is well spent. But as Ad Age reporter Steinberg once told reporters, the Super Bowl is "one of the few stable venues left." Its 2,100 seconds of ad time show which big companies really have money, which are true national brands that rise to the occasion, and which small brands can break through. Last year's Avocados from Mexico and 2014's GoldieBlox toys took off this way.

Looking back over 50 years, the Super Bowl sums up how far American sports business has gone in turning itself into entertainment. It brings together a television industry that grew up with new technology and brands eager to share in the business. Add half the American public and you get a full day of celebration every year.

From a businessman's point of view, the league teaches you how to keep teams healthy and give everyone a slice of the pie. From a more sentimental point of view, the Super Bowl is an American dream: it folds the organizing discipline of the industrial age, the zeal of westward expansion, and even Americans' grudges against one another into a single party. Calling it a "Spring Festival Gala" does not begin to cover it.

Graphics: Xie Yuchengyang