Annually, on the second Sunday of February, American capitalism convenes around a singular, electronic hearth to witness one of humanity’s last surviving shared cultural experiences.

We claim to watch for the football, yet plenty will readily admit they are there solely for the advertisements.

This Sunday, for Super Bowl LX, companies have shelled out a record-shattering sum for 30 seconds of airtime, approximately $266,000 per second, to break into the game’s action. A few premium slots are reportedly fetching as much as for a half-minute.

To grasp how we reached a point where a Pringles ad featuring Sabrina Carpenter carries a price tag exceeding the GDP of a small island country, we must glance back. Advertising is more than commerce; it is the archaeological record of human yearning. The earliest such artifact was discovered not on Madison Avenue, but in Thebes, Egypt.

The document, estimated to be from around 3,000 B.C., is thought to be a papyrus scroll authored by a cloth seller named Hapu. Archaeologists say the notice concerned an escaped slave named Shem. However, Hapu shifted gears in the middle of the text. After proposing a reward for Shem’s capture, he smoothly segued into a promotion something like: “The shop of Hapu the Weaver, where the finest cloth is woven to your liking.” It was likely history’s first, if morally dubious, bait-and-switch.

In antiquity, advertising was constrained by a fundamental limitation: literacy. In Egypt, Greece, and Rome, messages were daubed on walls (the frescoes of Pompeii are strewn with and ) or yelled aloud. During the Middle Ages and Elizabethan England, the town crier served as the chief broadcast channel. These men were employed to announce royal proclamations, but they also worked side jobs as mobile billboards, compensated by local shopkeepers to cry out about new shipments of fish or wine.

Since most patrons were illiterate, early promotion was visual. This was the age of the hanging sign—the Cobbler’s boot, the Baker’s bundle of wheat—emblems suspended above grimy European lanes to direct the non-reading public where to spend their money.

The mass-market advertising we recognize today emerged from the Industrial Revolution. It addressed a novel issue: overproduction. Prior to steam power, you crafted items for your local community. Afterward, you could produce more soap than your entire village could use in a century. You required outsiders to purchase your goods.

The first paid newspaper advertisement in the United States ran in 1704 (a property listing in the Boston News-Letter), but the sector truly boomed in the 1900s.

This resulted in two separate Golden Ages of advertising. The first was the zenith of print. For years, the Sunday paper and the glossy magazine were the giants of advertising income. This supremacy likely crested around the year 2000, just before the internet started its gradual dismantling of print media’s economic foundation. Per reports, newspaper ad revenue plummeted from about $49 billion in 2006 to less than $10 billion by 2022.

The second Golden Age was television’s rule. From the Mad Men period of the 1960s to the sitcom heyday of the 1990s, TV stood as the sole method to reach tens of millions simultaneously.

Although global TV revenue remains , in the United States, the platform is widely considered to be fading. Traditional linear TV ad expenditure is forecast to keep falling sharply to around $55 billion in 2026, a mere remnant of its past dominance as viewers shift to TikTok and Netflix, as per .

The internet did more than introduce a new channel; it flipped the business model. Google and Facebook (Meta) supplanted “broadcasting” (yelling at everyone) with “narrowcasting” (murmuring to the individual ready to buy).

This transformation has spawned a market of immense scale. In 2026, total U.S. ad spending is expected to near , driven by campaigns for the Olympics, the World Cup, and the midterm elections. Digital advertising is projected to make up most of this total. alone raked in over $196 billion in ad revenue in 2025. continues to be the undisputed king of digital ads, turning search queries into hundreds of billions in income. Amazon is now chipping away at the duopoly’s market share by selling advertisements on Prime Video and throughout its vast retail network.

This returns us to Super Bowl LX. In a time when Google lets marketers pinpoint extremely specific consumer groups for mere pennies per click, why spend $8 million on a 30-second slot?

Because the Super Bowl is the one phenomenon Google cannot duplicate. It is the final stronghold of genuine communal connection. In a divided society, it represents one of the rare instances where 120 million individuals gaze at the identical screen at the same moment. The Super Bowl commercial is no longer merely an ad; it is a status symbol, a display of power, and a marker of cultural significance. It is the sole venue where a brand can be certain its message will be viewed by a massive audience concurrently, in unison, as one.

This year, the cost of that cultural significance has reached a historic peak of $8 million. The roster of celebrities reflects the intense scramble to seize focus in an age of distraction. Anticipated appearances include Ben Affleck returning for ’, Kendall Jenner pushing online gambling firm , and Bud Light mobilizing the all-stars of American mainstream appeal: Peyton Manning and Post Malone.

Our captivation with Super Bowl ads reveals a more profound reality about modern capitalism. Attention has become so mined, individualized, and commodified that the uncommon occasion when it is willingly given en masse now demands a king’s ransom. The Super Bowl is not a refuge from the attention economy, but its highest point—an evening when advertising drops its subtlety and proclaims itself as pure show. The billions expended are not for artistry or wit, but for the final surviving mirage of collective experience—evidence that in our splintered culture, even communal feeling carries a cost.

We may have exchanged the town crier for the celebrity guest spot, and papyrus for pixels, but the core exchange stays the same. We pay with our focus, they pay with a show, and for one Sunday each year, we collectively deem the cost acceptable.