Los Angeles
NCS
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After Ben Affleck appeared as a Dunkin’ drive-thru employee in a Super Bowl business final 12 months, the breakfast chain’s gross sales exploded.
“They sold more donuts the next day than any other day in their history,” a person near the Dunkin’ Super Bowl marketing campaign informed NCS. “That says a lot.”
Getting into enterprise with the Boston-bred Affleck — an A-list fan of his hometown donut store who’s the quintessential spokesperson for the model — catapulted Dunkin’ into the pop-culture zeitgeist.
“We ran it once and got 7 billion media impressions, and it kind of kickstarted the year,” Scott Murphy, the president of Dunkin’, recently told Entrepreneur about Affleck’s 2023 Super Bowl ad, which was the corporate’s first business to ever run throughout the Big Game. “The brand is just in the conversation,” the manager added. “It just really feels in the fabric of things now.”
The success of Affleck’s Dunkin’ partnership is plain. But it didn’t come low cost.
Affleck was paid near $10 million {dollars} for final 12 months’s Dunkin’ Super Bowl commercial, three sources with information of the partnership informed NCS.
But it wasn’t a typical expertise deal. Aside from his on-camera participation, Affleck helped conceive the inventive idea of the advert, and his manufacturing firm that he shares with Matt Damon, Artists Equity, produced and directed the spot. Part of the deal to get Affleck on board was Dunkin’ making a sizable donation to his nonprofit, the Eastern Congo Initiative, ET reported final 12 months and a supply confirms to NCS.
Representatives for Affleck and Dunkin’ didn’t reply to NCS’s requests for remark. A spokesperson for Artists Equity declined remark.
Receiving an eight-figure paycheck for a few days of labor is uncommon, even in Hollywood, nevertheless it’s not unprecedented.
Larry David obtained $10 million to seem in a 2022 Super Bowl advert for FTX, a supply informed NCS, previous to the cryptocurrency firm’s collapse and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud conviction.
David didn’t reply to NCS’s request for remark, however the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star beforehand addressed his participation within the business, saying, “Part of my salary was in crypto—so I lost a lot of money.” (David has by no means commented on the monetary phrases of the deal, however in a 2023 biography of the disgraced Bankman-Fried, writer Michael Lewis wrote that David was paid $10 million for the Super Bowl spot.)
A-list stars like Affleck and David not often hawk merchandise and seem in US endorsement offers, which is a part of the driving pressure for their eye-popping salaries.
This 12 months, Super Bowl commercials are bursting with Hollywood stars: From Jennifer Aniston who reunited with “Friends” co-star David Schwimmer for Uber Eats to Chris Pratt with Pringles to Jason Momoa who’s selling T-Mobile’s high-speed Wi-Fi and even Martin Scorsese who directed and seems in a Squarespace advert, advertisers are shelling out the large bucks for this 12 months’s recreation.
The $10 million offers David and Affleck fetched are on the intense high-end for a Super Bowl paycheck, however quite a few model administration executives who spoke with NCS say that it’s uncommon for a family identify to seem throughout the Super Bowl for lower than $1 million.
“It can be as little as $25,000 for someone to do a cameo that’s not a megastar, but as high as $10 million. It depends on the brand and it depends on the stature of the celebrity,” says Tim Curtis, a associate within the model partnerships division on the Hollywood expertise company, WME. “The majority of bigger stars are usually in that $1 to $3 million range for Super Bowl, but there are exceptions that go out north of that. It’s rare for someone that you think of as a true movie star to be paid less than a million.”
Most Super Bowl shoots are often one to 2 days, the agent added.
At least two main Hollywood stars obtained greater than $5 million for their participation in ads this 12 months wherein they are seen on-camera for lower than 20 seconds, sources inform NCS.
“To bring content to the biggest stage and biggest platform out there, you need to have breakthrough power of what a celebrity can bring,” T-Mobile chief inventive officer, Peter DeLuca, tells NCS. “When you invest in a celebrity, you are investing in who they are and the work that they’ve done. They bring a lot of brand credibility – and when I say ‘brand,’ I’m referring to their brand.”
This 12 months, T-Mobile has struck offers with extra celebrities than ever for their Super Bowl campaigns. The firm has a lengthy historical past of using celebrities to create viral business moments. Last 12 months, “Scrubs” alums Zach Braff and Donald Faison teamed up with John Travolta for a musical quantity, and this 12 months, the duo is back, however this time with “Aquaman” star, Jason Momoa, and Jennifer Beals for a “Flashdance” musical advert.
Momoa is represented by the company WME, which has greater than 30 shoppers in Super Bowl ads this 12 months, together with Tina Fey (Booking.com), John Cena (FanDuel) and halftime performer Usher (who’s in two ads: Uber Eats and BMW), showcasing the immense worth of recognizable faces to manufacturers.
But for celebrities, it’s not at all times a simple promote. Even with a huge paycheck for a few hours of labor, top-tier expertise is selective with the roles they take.
“Honestly, we get more offers and more passes than we do acceptances. Even though we’ve got over 30 celebrities in the Super Bowl this year, we had over 70 offers. A lot of times people say no because it’s not the right organic fit,” WME agent, Curtis, says. “Most talent don’t want to just do a commercial for the sake of doing a commercial. They want something that’s going to be true to their brand and something they can be proud of out there. There are a lot of people watching, so it’s important that it really feels like it’s the right fit.”
Last 12 months’s Super Bowl drew over 115 million viewers. That enormous viewership is what makes it worthwhile for manufacturers to take a position tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars} into a mere few seconds on TV – and in a fragmented media panorama the place most viewers watching streaming programming from their telephone, reside airtime has turn out to be much more invaluable.
“It’s the one day of the year that you actually have consumers all sitting in front of the TV, watching together,” Curtis says. “You’ve got a guaranteed focused audience, and you have a lot of people sitting there watching the Super Bowl to watch the commercials – not necessarily watching the game.”
For the 2024 Super Bowl, commercials bought for a increased charge than final 12 months’s recreation with a vary of $6.5 to $7 million per 30-second spot, in accordance with two people acquainted with this 12 months’s promoting gross sales. Both sources say that CBS practically bought out all advert house by final November, months earlier than the large recreation.
All in, between advert house and expertise charges — to not point out hefty manufacturing prices, elaborate units, a whole lot of crew members, music licensing, advertising and marketing and social media spends — sources inform NCS that manufacturers can spend between $15 million and $50 million for a single Super Bowl business with $10 to $15 million spent on expertise alone. This 12 months, a new pattern is rising: hiring a number of stars for one commercial — which means a number of contracts.
Aside from T-Mobile, which has two star-studded commercials this 12 months, Uber Eats unveiled a celebrity-filled marketing campaign that features Aniston, Schwimmer, Jelly Roll, plus Victoria and David Beckham.
“Between production costs and the ad space, you are already spending many tens of millions of dollars,” a person acquainted with Super Bowl ads tells NCS. “Not to sound cavalier, but it’s a little bit of a drop in the bucket to tack on the talent fees.”