By Ramona du Houx February 14, 2022 It’s taken 17 years and over 900 total ads for climate change to finally break through at the Super Bowl with the narrative that electric vehicles (EVs) are the norm.Toyota debuted its hybrid Prius for the first time at the Super Bowl back in 2005, calling it ‘good news for planet Earth.’ In […]
By Ramona du Houx
February 14, 2022
It’s taken 17 years and over 900 total ads for climate change to finally break through at the Super Bowl with the narrative that electric vehicles (EVs) are the norm.Toyota debuted its hybrid Prius for the first time at the Super Bowl back in 2005, calling it ‘good news for planet Earth.’ In 2006, there were two Super Bowl ads for new hybrids: one for Toyota’s Camry hybrid, and one ad for Fords’ new Escape hybrid in which Kermit the Frog concluded that maybe it was easy being green, after all.
The Super Bowl is the most watched TV event in the U.S. and this year nearly 100 million people were estimated to have tuned in. For companies hoping to get their product in front of this captive audience for just 30 seconds, it meant spending an average $6.5 million. During the game, there were at least nine ads talking about electric vehicles, EV chargers, climate change and taking care of the earth. Based on the reported price tag per ad, top brands like GM, Chevy, BMW, Nissan and Salesforce likely spent more than $60 million to get the American public on board with switching to electric vehicles and protecting the planet.
The result of the new EV narrative ads was clear at Cars.com when a 217 percent average boost to visits to those automakers’’ brand pages on its site happened. A car made by the lesser-known EV brand Polestar shot to the No. 1 spot on Cars.com’s most-visited list during the game, with a 580-fold boost in its visibility on the platform.
President Joe Biden tweeted: today, ‘The ads during last night’s Super Bowl were clear: The future of the auto industry is electric.”
“The Hyundai campaign was part of a watershed year for electric vehicle advertising. Many of the major automakers, for the first time, began giving plug-ins the kind of nationwide push typically reserved for their best-selling combustion engine models. . . . Ads for traditional models slid by more than 35,000 airings, with automakers lowering their national TV budgets from an estimated $3.8 billion in 2019 to $3.1 billion in 2021,” wrote Bloomberg.
According to Politico,, “Five out of seven car commercials during Sunday’s Super Bowl specifically touted their electric vehicles, and a sixth also featured an EV, not to mention an ad for a home EV charger. It’s the latest indication of the muscle and money automakers are putting behind the transition to EVs.
