SIFMA Foundation
Stock Prices and the Super Bowl
Standard
Standard: 4
- Students will understand that: People can choose to invest some of their money in financial assets to achieve long-term financial goals, such as buying a house, funding future education, or securing retirement income. Investors receive a return on their investment in the form of income and/or growth in value of their investment over time. People can more easily achieve their financial goals by investing steadily over many years, reinvesting dividends, and capital gains to compound their returns. Investors have many choices of investments that differ in expected rates of return and risk. Riskier investments tend to earn higher long-run rates of return than lower-risk investments. Investors select investments that are consistent with their risk tolerance, and they diversify across a number of different investment choices to reduce investment risk.
The Monday after the Super Bowl, students will be talking about the commercials. Super Bowl commercials have developed into their own event, complete with enthusiastic fans. Media experts pit the advertising agencies that produced the commercials against each other in an “Advertising Super Bowl.”
For a 30-second Super Bowl commercial this year, companies will pay Fox, the network that will broadcast Super Bowl LVII, close to $7 million dollars. Variety reported in September 2022 that despite the cost, ad spaces were nearly sold out.
This lesson, created by Allen Cox and Vincent Young for the SIFMA Foundation for Investor Education’s Stock Market Game asks students to analyze the stock prices of companies who buy ad time during the Super Bowl. Did that advertising positively impact stock prices? Is it worth the multimillion dollar price tag?