It’s been more than a week since the Philadelphia Eagles upset against the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LII that brought the first professional sports title to the city of brotherly love. But the Super Bowl is much more than just the apex of sporting achievements it is also the center stage for commercials. This year the price of a single commercial was more than 5 million dollar. WIth such a high prices, you would expect the companies to get 5 million bangs for their buck. Though billions of dollars are at stake, it is not clear how to measure the ROI.
One way to approach this problem is to see just how the stocks of the presenting companies have performed in the week following the airing of the most coveted spot in the media world.
Before we present the results, it’s important to discuss the method, especially in a week like the one we had in the markets: we compared the performance of the stocks to the performance of the S&P 500 ($SPY) in the same period. The bottom line: Companies that aired ads during the Super Bowl were less affected by the markets correction:
As we can see, when looking at the companies that presented in the Super Bowl as a whole, they outperformed the market by 0.96% which is 121% better than the S&P 500. As to individual stock performance, 13% (4 companies) had a positive outcome this week while only 9% of the S&P 500 stocks.
Comcast ($CMCSA), the parent company of NBC, the network that broadcast the game had several commercials for its movies and TV shows and could have expected to have a good week. But it is situated in the bottom third of stocks with a 6.59 decrease in its share value. This can be attributed to its short blackout during one of the commercial breaks.
On the other hand, Viacom (VIAB) one of its biggest competitors in the media sector was the second highest performer on the list with 1.98% increase.
One of the most talked ads during the broadcast was Tide with David Harbour in a meta reflective ad about ads, including the iconic spot series for “old spice”. unfortunately for Procter and Gamble ($PG) the hype didn’t reach the markets and the stock underperformed with a 5.42% decrease.
The best performing stock within those with Super Bowl ads is Kellogg’s ($K) with a commercial for Pringles starring Bill Header, gaining 2.79% from the previous week, and is now just 1% lower than before the markets started to shake.
We’re not suggesting you have to go and run an ad in the next Super Bowl, but having an ad in the Super Bowl might be a good measure (among others) when buying stock options. Who knows, we might add it as a filter in our scanner in the future 😉 .
