Reports of TV’s demise have not been greatly exaggerated; TV is in huge financial trouble, as is almost every form of traditional media business. Websites are being scraped and summarized by AI, streaming business models are questionable for most non-tech organizations (with few exceptions, tech organizations do not rely on streaming revenue), debt services is excruciating, and then there’s linear television – which has been pronounced dead every year for about the past 20 years.
There are about 44 days of primetime television every year. You can practically name them. They are the culturally relevant tentpole events we all know. The biggest day, by far, is Super Bowl Sunday. (Other nights include playoff games, awards shows, etc.) If you live in the United States – or care about American culture – you are going to be one of the millions of people who make up the largest U.S.-centric audience of the year. (Believe it or not, there are even bigger audiences; the FIFA 2022 final between Argentina and France reached an estimated 1.5 billion viewers.)
That said, Super Bowl LVIII, which aired on CBS and was simulcast on various platforms (including Paramount+, Univision, and Nickelodeon), achieved a record-breaking 123.4 million viewers, making it the most-watched television broadcast in the United States since the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 and surpassing last year’s Super Bowl viewership of 115 million.
Several factors contributed to this high viewership, including the overtime thriller, the presence of Taylor Swift (who attended to support her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs TE Travis Kelce), and the NFL’s ability to draw large live audiences in a fragmented media landscape. The game was also the most streamed Super Bowl ever; CBS reported that the Paramount+ portion of the audience was included in the 120 million viewers for the CBS telecast.
Nielsen’s ratings do not include people who watched in public spaces (such as bars), so the actual number of viewers were probably higher. As an aside, the final episode of M*A*S*H in 1983 still holds the record for the largest household rating, with 60.2% of all TV homes watching the finale.
This Super Bowl has many lessons to teach. First and foremost, when you have a truly culturally relevant event, TV offers unequaled reach. If awareness solves your advertising/marketing problems, nothing delivers like television.
Of course, awareness does not solve every communications problem, and (more obviously) the .xx rating on XYZ cable channel on Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m. is almost immeasurable (by media weight standards), and it has been slowly declining for the past two decades. Irrelevant programming is… well… irrelevant.
Congrats to the NFL for bringing America together for a great night of football, and congrats to Bob Bakish, John Halley, and the entire team at Paramount Global for their big win. There’s plenty of time to worry about the future of traditional media, but for today, let’s rejoice in the unqualified success of a 58-year-old American tradition.
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.