Can NBC Break Its Own Super Bowl Ratings Record From 2015?

NFL ratings were down 10 percent this season, but NBC Sports execs haven’t given up hope of topping their own Super Bowl viewership record—114.4 million tuned in to watch Super Bowl XLIX in 2015, the last time it aired on NBC—during Sunday’s game. “We love having the record; we would love to break our own record,” said Fred Gaudelli, executive producer of Super Bowl LII as well as NBC’s Thursday Night Football and Sunday Night Football. “Am I expecting it? I’m not sure about that. But will I be disappointed? Yeah, I’ll be disappointed if we don’t break it." Each time NBC broadcasts the Super Bowl, “we still want the biggest audience we can get,” said Mark Lazarus, chairman, NBC Broadcasting and Sports. “We have the biggest audience ever from a Super Bowl, and we’d like to keep that or expand on that.” But will this season's softer NFL ratings dent the audience for Super Bowl LII? “Logic would say probably, possibly, but I don’t know,” Gaudelli said. “It’s still the biggest event in America. Are people not going to watch? I doubt it.” During the past two years, neither Fox (111.3 million in 2017) nor CBS (111.9 million in 2016) came close to NBC’s 2015 numbers. When NBC aired Super Bowl XLVI in 2012, it also broke the record at the time, drawing 111.3 million (the same audience Fox pulled in last year). Both times, NBC had “good fortune with exciting games,” Lazarus said. During the 2015 matchup in which the New England Patriots beat the Seattle Seahawks, “the whole two-week buildup to that game was Deflategate,” Gaudelli recalled. “If you weren’t planning on watching, that may have raised your curiosity to watch.” Three years prior, NBC aired the second New York Giants-New England Super Bowl clash in five years which the Giants won once again. “That was New York and Boston, so you get that,” Gaudelli said. However, Lazarus said the real reason for NBC’s Super Bowl ratings dominance might come down to the scale of NBCUniversal. “We think we’re bigger and better marketers with Symphony [which leverages the company’s entire portfolio to drive awareness and engagement] and how we attract people who wouldn’t necessarily watch,” he said. No matter what Sunday’s ratings are, NBC has already set one Super Bowl record: With ads going for more than $5 million per 30-second spot, it is looking at $500 million in ad revenue ($350 million of which comes from in-game advertising), which is more than any media company has ever collected in a single day.