WWE won’t be paying anything for their two Super Bowl LVI commercials on Sunday night. Reports popped up earlier this week that two ads centered around WrestleMania 38 would be airing on Sunday, one during the pregame coverage on NBC and a 15-second spot during the game itself. Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer followed up by stating the ads were actually paid for and centering around the Peacock streaming service and would only feature mentions of WrestleMania 38. He then added that Vince McMahon believes paying millions for a commercial during the Super Bowl is a waste of money.
Videos by ComicBook.com
WWE only ran a Super Bowl ad once back in 1999. It did however try to capitalize off the game’s popularity with three Halftime Heat specials in 1999, 2000 and 2019.
“They’re not buying the commercial,” Meltzer explained on Wrestling Observer Radio. “The network is buying the commercials. It’s a Peacock commercial, not a WWE commercial. WrestleMania will be featured in the Peacock commercial.”
“Vince has said publicly and he has said to me that it was a waste of money,” Meltzer added. “That’s why they never did it again. At the time everybody talked about it but for what their company is — a Super Bowl commercial for some things would work. A Super Bowl commercial for Peacock makes sense…”
Aside from the 1999 ad, the most famous Super Bowl-related moment in WWE history was The Rock vs. Mankind in an Empty Arena Match which saw Mick Foley become the new WWF Champion.
“I think a year earlier MTV has had a lot of success doing Celebrity Deathmatch with claymation figures — one of which was Stone Cold Steve Austin — and they’d done a tremendous rating during halftime of the Super Bowl,” Foley said in an interview with ESPN ahead of the 2019 Halftime Heat. “I don’t know when the idea came to Mr. McMahon to take that giant audience and kind of keep it for ourselves, but I do remember being asked about it — and then it was my suggestion that The Rock and I do an empty arena match.”
“The fact that it was so completely different than anything on television was also indicative of the chances we regularly took, whether it was on the microphone or in the ring,” he continued. “Later on, [that] really led to great chemistry as a tag team. We were really rolling, and it was understood that The Rock was going to go on to bigger and better things — one of them being a WrestleMania main event with Stone Cold Steve Austin.”
Related Posts
-
Image Courtesy of WWE
