The Real Super Bowl XLVIII Winner Will Be New York

As the hype of the NFL Draft dies down and we look forward to the upcoming season, there is no doubt that the New York Giants may be in contention to become the first team to ever to play in the Super Bowl in its home stadium. Regardless of the Giants’ success in the upcoming season, when Super Bowl XLVIII rolls around, New York will certainly be a winner.

With the blossoming of social media, the anticipation and coverage of the Super Bowl in the last few years has been tremendous. The simplest way to see this is of course through the cost of an advertisement. Comparing the price of a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl over the years, the cost has risen from $275,000 in 1967 to $4,000,000 in 2013, adjusted for inflation. This ludicrous number isn’t reaching a plateau, either as the cost was $2,650,000 in 2010, $3,000,000 in 2011, and $3,500,000 in 2012. Without accounting for inflation, the price of such an ad has risen twice as fast as college tuition since 1978, which has gone up four times as fast as inflation.

Along with so much attention to the big game which has reached over 100 million viewers over the last few years, comes the real kicker for New York: increased consumer spending.

Examining Superbowl XLVI, gross expenditures reached $384 million, with total spending from outside of the Indianapolis metro area at $342 million. With 116,000 visitors flocking to Indianapolis, hotel occupancy rates reached 99% for downtown hotels, with prices up almost 300%. Additionally game attendees and other non-resident visitors spent approximately $571 per person, per day. By contrast, the average person who visits Indianapolis for business spends approximately one third of that number. Furthermore, despite in total only being a four-hour game, the Super Bowl generated 5,500 full-time jobs for the city of Indianapolis. Perhaps the biggest number for the host state, Indiana, is it brought in an additional $40 million in taxes to state and local governments.

Now let’s backtrack for a second. That Super Bowl took place in Indianapolis, a city with about 830,000 residents, and over one million people visited Super Bowl village during the days surrounding the game. While Super Bowl XLVIII is not directly in New York City, it is very nearby and one can expect that most attendees will be staying there. New York City, one of the world’s largest tourist hubs, has a population 10 times the size of Indianapolis. Unsurprisingly, tourists spend over seven times as much money in New York as they do in Indianapolis. Based on these numbers, the economic boost the Super Bowl will bring to New York in February 2014 will be in the billions of dollars.

Read more at http://www.rantsports.com/nfl/2013/05/03/the-real-super-bowl-xlviii-winner-will-be-new-york/?Mukjg1bCkga1yeyz.99