Do advertisers get the attention they paid for when the Super Bowl game is a blowout -- like Sunday's Super Bowl LIX game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs?

Paying $8 million for 30 seconds of advertising can't be easy to swallow -- especially when you are thinking the game has become so one-sided that viewers may not want to stay tuned in, despite the insistence of analysts and advertisers that the ads carry the game even when the game falters.

Samba TV estimates that 37.1 million U.S. households watched Super Bowl LIX on Sunday -- down 5% from 2024.

There was a dramatic dropoff in viewership throughout the course of the game, Samba estimates. "The peak audience was seen during the Halftime Show, with the percentage of total viewership falling from 100% during the show to 70% at the end of the game," the company reported. "By comparison, last year’s game ended with 89% of the peak audience watching by the end of the game."

Samba reported that Nike was the most-watched brand ad of the Super Bowl that aired nationally (outside of Fox, Fox-affiliated brands, and NFL), reaching 28.1 million households, followed by the Novartis ad and the RAM ad -- each reached around 28 million households.

The halftime show featuring Kendrick Lamar seemed to impress viewers less. 

Many of Lamar's fans took to social media to voice their surprise over the NFL's pick for the halftime act. A post published in Outkick said Lamar's performance was "a treat for his SoCal base, [but] it didn't come close to matching the highs of famous Super Bowl halftime acts for general audiences, quite like Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and others' performances at the Big Game."

Sprout Social, which monitors social media mentions, had a different take on Kendrick Lamar. The company believes “Kendrick Lamar stole the show with 887,243 mentions for 14 million engagements, out-buzzing Usher's performance last year, which drew 364,000 mentions and 2.6 million engagements.”

There is no shortage of data telling us what brands had the best Super Bowl ads. But what about the most effective ads during a game when one team outplays the other, making it no longer exciting to watch?

I want to know how many Super Bowl viewers walked away from the game despite keeping the television on, missing the commercials. By the end of the first half, the Eagles had a 24-0 lead over the Chiefs.

“In today's Super Bowl, the score of the game doesn't affect ad viewership as much as it used to,” Olivia McNaughten, senior director of product marketing and partnerships at influencer marketing software company GRIN, wrote in an email to MediaPost. “With modern marketing tactics such as influencer campaigns and social media strategies, those external campaign activations (outside of the 30-second ad slot) are how a brand really finds their audience and extends viewership.”

Take Poppi, for example. McNaughten said the bulk of their target audience likely doesn't care too much about the score of the game, which is why they leveraged influencers and focused on promoting the ad through social channels.

With advertisers spending millions to run one 30-second ad, what was the chance that viewers would turn off or at the least turn away from the game and commercials?

Attention plays a major role in this type of investment, although brands augment their TV commercials with social media.

TVision's Attention Index measures how well an ad or program captures the attention of the person in the room, with eyes on the screen, compared to the average for all ads across television and connected TV.

TVision estimates that Q2 and Q3 were the best times for advertisers to capture attention in general. These are the five ads that best captured attention from viewers in the room. 

The Kansas City Chiefs finally scored their first points late in the third quarter, but the Eagles still led, with a score of 34 to the Chief's 6 at that point.

An ad from the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism with 130.3 AI took the most attention, followed by Bud Light with 128.3 AI, Pringles with 127.9 AI, Budweiser with 127.9 AI, and Tubi with 127.2 AI, according to TVision.

All five ads ran in quarters two or three. Those are the two quarters when action on the field was most exciting for a fan base that was rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles to derail the Kansas City Chiefs' three-peat attempts. Ad Attention slightly increased in Q2 over Q3, wrote TVision in a blog post.