This year’s Super Bowl between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers was a football game featuring head coaches who were brothers, Beyoncé signing at half time, and a power outage.  This, however, is not why many people watch the Super Bowl.  Every year over 11.3 million people watch the game and the commercials.

Costing as much as $4 million for a 30 second spot, Super Bowl advertisers have to produce the ads that will be worth their cost.

When Apple invested in a Super Bowl commercial aired during the 1984 Super Bowl. It has received four awards and is generally considered the turning point in Super Bowl advertising. This feature-film quality ad instantly changed both advertisers’ perspectives on what could be done with a Super Bowl ad and audience’s perspectives on Super Bowl advertising.

In this year’s Super Bowl, the commercial that had NFL players and scouts tweeting about NFL network’s Leon Sandcastle. In commercial, Deion Sanders put on a mustache and an afro and tried to relieve his glory day in the NFL. He changed his name to Leon Sandcastle and was drafted to the Kansas City Chiefs.

 Another hit commercial this year was Volkswagen’s “Get In.  Get Happy,” the concept is that driving a Volkswagen will make you happy.  In it, the driver transforms into a laid-back Jamaican in the style of Bob Marley, telling everyone around him to “Don’t worry, be happy.”

Hyundai also shined with their underdog commercial called “Team.” Here a boy is being bullied by a group which tells him that if he wants to play football, he must have a team.  His mother drives around in her Hyundai to pick up a rag tag group of tough boys to form his team. Each of these boys is either lifting weights or a wrestling bears, the group comes together and plays the bullies.    

The advertisers spend millions of dollars to make their name known throughout the country to make their product known. Even as the stadium lights went off, the Super Bowl ads never stopped rolling.