Could A Super Bowl Commercial Really Be Worth $10 Million? Suprisingly, Yes.

NBC executive Seth Winter said the value of a Super Bowl commercial is way beyond the $4.5 million price tag for a 30 second ad. He added that the true value of exposure, which includes things like online views and other positive PR associated with the game, is closer to $10 million.

“We did an analysis around last year’s Super Bowl that Fox ran, and our analysis showed that with all of the video distribution pre- and post-game, the value of the PR, the value of all of that which advertisers used to activate around their investment that it reached a very solid good foundation number of $10 million.”

Winter and NBC’s $10 million value is based on four main components.

First is basic television viewership. Last year’s game had around 112 million live viewers. And surveys of last year’s viewers showed what advertisers have long intuited: Super Bowl ads create a particularly strong brand recall. It turns out the typical advertiser received 54% higher brand recall from a Super Bowl ad than it did for commercials aired in primetime over the previous year. In other words, those 112 million sets of eyeballs were the equivalent of more than 170 million viewers. And that’s just on TV.

The second component is social media, which, between YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, adds an average 19 million impressions.

The third part is the value generated by widespread media coverage of the game’s commercials. Market research firm Repucom calculated that the typical Super Bowl ad generates another $480,000 in TV and online media exposure, bringing the total ad value to just over $8 million.

Rounding out the final $10 million is a roughly estimated component comprised of increased brand awareness, an immediate boost in company sales and a measurable surge in stock prices, as detailed in a 2011 study by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.