Like So Much This Year In The NFL, The Pandemic Is Taking A Toll — On Super Bowl Ads

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Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady reacts after winning the NFC championship against the Green Bay Packers in Green Bay, Wis., on Sunday. The Buccaneers will meet AFC champions Kansas City Chiefs Feb. 7 in Super Bowl LV.

Jeffrey Phelps/AP

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Jeffrey Phelps/AP

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The annual rotation brings the game to CBS this year, which has yet to announce all its game-time ads have been sold. Super Bowl ads usually sell out well in advance of the game, which will take place Feb. 7 in Tampa Bay, Fla., when the host city’s Buccaneers take on the Kansas City Chiefs.

What the impact of pandemic restrictions will be on the television audience is unclear.

Super Bowl ads have come to be a marquee attraction themselves. Viewers and critics rate the ads in an informal competition. Some have been culture-defining moments that overshadow the football game.

That could be said of the last time an event so clearly altered Budweiser’s advertising. Twenty years ago, Super Bowl XXXVI followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States by only five months and the country was already at war in Afghanistan.

The Clydesdale draft horses starred in that elegiac tribute, as they traveled from rural America to New York City, where the eight-horse team knelt before the former site of the Twin Towers.