It costs $7 million for a 30 second spot. The Super Bowl is the only event where you can find 1/3 of America watching it, including many who are not into sports but dragged by loved ones to a Super Bowl party, so advertisers have a long history of trying to come up with the most flashy, catchy, outlandish, high production ads they can produce in the hopes that it sticks in the audience’s mind and gets people talking about it so they will tell the other 2/3 of America about talking frogs or whatever the hot new thing is. Each year there are whole articles out there about “this year’s best Super Bowl ads”.

You have to keep in mind that American football is extremely suited to ads with all the breaks in play, so it has been a favorite of advertisers for a long time. I don’t know why so many people fell in love with a game with so little action in the first place, but this is the end result of that.