Fox says Super Bowl ads sold out for $5.6 million apiece

Fox Sports has sold out its inventory of Super Bowl ads after pricing 30-second spots for television’s biggest annual event at a record $5.6 million. The Fox Corp. unit finished selling all 77 national spots on Friday, according to Seth Winter, executive vice president for sports sales at Fox Sports. He said most ads for the National Football League championship game tend to sell out around Christmas, or even later into January. “Clearly the NFL is still the most powerful media platform in all of sports and all of television,” Winter said. “Advertisers have seen the restoration of healthy ratings and an environment that doesn’t create caution on their part, so they’ve dived headfirst into the NFL.” While single 30-second commercials for the Feb. 2 game in Miami cost $5.6 million, discounts were offered to those that bought more. Every ad sold for more than $5 million, except for one company, whose long-standing bulk order kept its pricing under that threshold, Winter said. Using rough calculations, the total sales figure probably eclipsed $400 million.