There’s a whole lot of people who watched the super bowl this year, 111.9 million to be exact. A good number of those people just watched to see Lady Gaga sing the national anthem or to see Coldplay perform at halftime, but many  watched solely for the commercials. In general, Prairie Ridge students felt disappointed by ads and let down by the high standards set by the past super bowls.

In general, PR students think that none of the commercials did what commercials are supposed to do – sell products. They were more entertaining than informative, although the two Doritos ads did make people crave Doritos. Students felt that out of the numerous commercials shown throughout the night, only a select few brought attention to the product being advertised.

This is unfortunate, considering ESPN reports that companies spent in total around 357.8 million dollars on super bowl commercials this year alone.

When Wolf Prints asked PR students to guess how much a Super Bowl commercial costs, most of Prairie Ridge students lowballed their estimates, guessing from ranges of $2,000 to $2,500,000.

How much does a commercial during the super bowl cost to air? According to the Wall Street Journal, “the cost is right around $4.5 million for a 30-second spot,” but the price could be higher if the ad is shown during the first or fourth quarter, “as those are premium spots” because more people are paying attention to the game then.

Only a few commercials were memorable this year, with the others falling flat. A couple of crowd favorites were the Mountain Dew puppy monkey baby, and the Mazda and Pokemon commercials. But the reigning champ was the Heinz commercial, with the weiner dogs dressed as hot dogs running towards the bottles of ketchup and mustard.

So were the Super Bowl 50 commercials as great as they were made out to be? According to Prairie Ridge, no.