The Automaker Big Game Commercials If You Missed Them

Credit: Cadillac.

It was not much of a game, especially if you are a Kansas City Chiefs fan, but there were some entertaining car commercials. Kia and Hyundai opted out of commercials this year and instead donated money to some youth charities.

This year, the commercial rates during the big game dropped slightly to five million five hundred thousand dollars for thirty-seconds. Many of the commercials were sixty-seconds long, and in some cases, the cost of producing the ad was as much as the commercial time.

We saw about half the automotive ads we typically do, likely due to Covid-19.

According to automotive website Cars.com:

This year�s big winner was Cadillac with its Edward-Scissorhands-inspired commercial that led to a 194% traffic bump to its respective branded pages on Cars.com. GM also saw triple-digit traffic increases to its EV pages on the marketplace while Jeep came in third place at a whopping 93% lift from car-shopping football fans. Overall, auto brands� Big Game commercials drove a 38% average increase in Cars.com site pageviews as football fans multitasked during the game and sought the marketplace�s trusted third-party input to aid them on their shopping journey. - Cars.com

If you ran a car company, would you spend that kind of money on a TV ad?

Below are the automakers TV commercials that played during the big game, and my pick for the worst car commercial I saw. Note that Jeep's Big Game ad starring Bruce Springsteen titled "The Middle" was pulled from YouTube this week, following reports of his arrest on DWI charges in November 2020. The Jeep ad was Springsteen's first commercial ever.