SUPER BOWL AD COSTS $233K PER SECOND

So we've all seen the Super Bowl ad starring Serena Williams, but did you know that Ro paid $233,000 per second for that ad? Now companies almost never share the actual economics behind a Super Bowl ad, but Ro's CEO posted a full breakdown of what they're spending and why they think it's worth it. So the baseline cost here is $233,000 per second for airtime alone. A 30-second spot runs $7-10 million, production adds another $1-4 million, celebrity talent runs anywhere between $1-5 million, and then the network requires matching spend on other programming. So your total committed spend lands between $16-29 million. But once you break down the economics, the decision starts to look very different. The Super Bowl is not just another media buy. It is a uniquely concentrated moment where attention, scale, and cultural relevance align in a way that doesn't exist anywhere else in the media landscape. That alone changes the calculus. This leads us down a fascinating discussion of the economics behind DTC advertising, brand building, and the production of the spot. And Ro's CEO argues that the Super Bowl is the only advertising moment where those numbers can actually make sense. For context, the NFL accounted for 84 of the top 100 televised events in 2025, and the Super Bowl is the one time all year where viewers maybe want to watch ads rather than actively skip them. The last point, "drive efficiency in future advertising", is where a large part of the asymmetric upside can come from. Increased brand awareness and affinity can increase the efficiency of all future forms of advertising (e.g., TV, Social, Search, Audio etc.). What if it made a company's future spend of 2%, 5%, or even 10% more efficient? What if it had that impact for the next 3 months? What about 6 months or a year? So when more people recognize your brand, your TV ads convert better, your search ads get cheaper, and word of mouth just does a lot more of the work for you. So if a $10 million Super Bowl ad makes a company's $500 million annual marketing budget just 2% more efficient, it covers that cost within 12 months. And even if the ad completely fails, it decreases overall marketing efficiency by 0.5-2.5% for a company at Ro's scale. But if it lands, the compounding effects overtime can reach $50-100 million. So the downside is basically a rounding error, but the upside is pretty asymmetric.