Thinking about advertising your business during one of the most-watched events for 2025? Before you contact the NFL or your local TV station, you might want to know two very important things. First, traditional linear TV viewership makes up less than 50% of TV usage. Second, the average cost of a 30 second Super Bowl ad is now over $8 million. And guess what? This number just increases year after year. Yikes.
Fear not! Digital streaming has been on the rise for years with numerous platforms offering subscription services to viewers. YouTube TV is just one of them, and an increase in Super Bowl digital live streams is why YouTube ads are a great advertising opportunity that businesses should look to outside the traditional realm.
Youtube’s Streaming Surge: A Treat for Advertisers
YouTube is stealing the show with TV viewers. As of December 2024, the platform now accounts for over 11.1% of daily TV viewership in the US. Holding the largest percentage of any platform, that’s not just a nibble on the market.
A big slice of this success comes from sports content. In Q2 2024, viewers devoured 35 billion hours of sports-related videos, a jaw-dropping 45% jump from the previous year. YouTube’s CEO, Neal Mohan, has made it clear, sports fans are showing up and they’re staying for the long haul.
Personalize Your YouTube Ads
According to Google Trends, since 2016 YouTube search interests are up 49% for “super bowl.” This provides an interesting opportunity to personalize your ads based on your potential customer’s interests and search terms. Do you know if your target audience or potential customers like football or plan to watch the Super Bowl? Most likely, therefore, it’s time to get creative with your personalization.
Gather Insights for Video Creative
Before you begin the campaign, your video ad has five possible ways to be viewed on YouTube (and you should definitely test them all):
- In-Feed Video Ads show up on the YouTube homepage, search results pages, and as related videos on YouTube video watch pages.
- Skippable in-stream ads are displayed for at least 5 seconds before they can be skipped.
- Non-skippable in-stream ads may appear pre-, mid-, or post-roll and allow you to share your entire message with up to either a 15 or 20-second non-skippable.
- Bumper ads are 6 seconds or shorter and appear at the beginning of a viewers chosen video. Viewers are unable to skip them.
- YouTube Display ads do not interrupt the video, and are seen on desktops only. They appear on the upper-right side of the screen above the “up next” video list and can be either an image or video, however, sound will not play unless clicked on.
- Pause Ads: The newest ad format and recently rolled out in 2024, pause ads appear when a viewer pauses a video. This provides a non-intrusive way to display static or animated ads without disrupting the viewing experience.
Big Players: YouTube Masthead is another option for large brands with a big budget. They are basically a digital billboard placed on YouTube’s homepage for 24 hours. You are not able to target your audience outside of picking a single country, and pricing is not known without reaching out to an agent. Generally speaking, they average $300,000 – $400,000.
By keeping this in mind, start digging into your customer trends to determine what ideas will work best for your video ad. For example, OLAY® ran a 2019 Super Bowl Ad based on a trend analysis that showed their audience loves football and horror movies. The #KillerSkin campaign was born, and they released teasers on YouTube during the lead-up to the big game. After the release of their Super Bowl ad, OLAY® released three different alternate endings encouraging fans to share their favorite. This campaign alone generated tens of millions of views and contributed to a 71% increase in brand searches.
Game Over for Them Not You
The time you leave your ad running is determined by the search trend your ad is targeting. Although fan queries around the Super Bowl increase 2.5x each week leading up to game day, YouTube searches actually peak the day after the Super Bowl and sustain game day levels for a few more days. This search trend suggests the crucial moments for your brand to be most effective leading up to and following the game.
Digital & TV on the Same Team
Even though Cyberlicious® is a full-service digital marketing agency, we do traditional, too. We recommend to our partners that they should do anything and everything that works for their business. How do we know if a traditional campaign is actually working? For print, radio, and even TV, our toolset includes things like coupon/QR codes, phone call tracking, web analytics for online activity, and so much more.
Let’s learn from Lexus, an automaker, and how they combined digital YouTube ads with TV. Lexus created this delightful four-minute video with the college star quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Matt Leinart on their YouTube channel. They coupled this video with a 30-second clip promoting the “next generation of quarterback safety.” According to Jessamine Merrill, GM of Lexus product and customer marketing, the digital-first approach “enabled our creative team to create humorous yet in-depth videos, centered on a four-minute parody showcasing Mr. Leinart’s talent and riffing on real safety features of the Lexus UX.” The video has generated over 213,900 views: