How Much Does It Cost To Buy An Oscars Ad Spot?

The 2016 Academy Awards are well underway, and already one brand has slipped up, confusing Whoopi Goldberg with Oprah. True story. But embarrassing gaffs aside, the Oscars ain’t no poor person’s party.

It’ll cost you more than a pretty penny to nab a 30-second ad spot during the 2016 Academy Awards, with estimates from Kantar Media placing the price tag around the $US1.9 million mark.

Figures from the research firm, according to MediaPost, have shown that for half a minute of commercial time wedged in between this year’s Oscars broadcast on US ABC will require marketers to fork out between $US1.9 and two million, an upgrade from its $US1.83 million cost last year.

ABC – which holds broadcasting rights for the Academy Awards until 2020 – generated $US110 million in advertising revenue from the event in 2015, Kantar said, versus $US95 million in 2014.

And this year’s ceremony promises to be even more lucrative for the network, potentially fattening the network’s wallets by around $US135 million.

Drilling down into the data, Kantar said that the 2015 Oscars show featured 29 minutes and 45 seconds of ads – up by over five minutes from 2011 – as well as promo spots and local ads. Around 60 thirty-second advertising units typically run in the Oscar event.

By way of comparisons, the Academy Awards’ ad spend is higher than CBS’ Grammy Awards at $US75 million and NBC’s Golden Globes at $US42 million. The Super Bowl remains the single biggest advertising event of the year.

Throughout the last five years, Samsung has pitched in the biggest amount, investing $61 million, followed by department-store chain JC Penney, on a budget of around $52 million.

Rounding out the top five on this measure, Kantar found, were Hyundai, American Express and Coca-Cola.

A range of ads are set to screen during the awards ceremony, including the first ever ad campaign from LinkedIn, in an attempt to comeback from its 44 per cent plummet of its stock, that has a Gravity-esque theme to it.

Narrated by Linkedin’s chief executive Jeff Weiner, the TVC called ‘You’re closer than you think,’ tells the story of when NASA used LinkedIn to look for its next astronaut. The networking website reckons its data found a whopping three million users who were qualified to apply for the role.

IBM is also debuting two ads starring filmmaker Ridley Scott, actress Carrie Fisher and its Watson cognitive computing system, in the hopes of dismissing the ‘dystopian’ view of artificial intelligence.

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