Toronto, Canada – NEW YORK (Reuters) - CBS has sold about 90 percent of the available commercial time for the upcoming Super Bowl, with prices for a 30-second spot running close to $3 million, CBS Corp Chief Executive Les Moonves said on Tuesday.
Moonves said that Budweiser and Bud Light, owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev, are top advertisers again this year, but that "a couple of new guys" are considering buying spots for CBS's broadcast of the championship football game.
"We are still almost two months away, we only have five or six spots to sell," Moonves said at the UBS Media and Communications Conference.
"That's considerably better than we were three years ago when we had the last Super Bowl and considerably better, I think, than where NBC was at this time last year," he said, adding that advertisers are "willing to pay close to $3 million" for 30-second spots.
Always the biggest advertising event of the year, commercial rates are far above what is paid for any other TV event, partly because the game draws around 95 million U.S. viewers.
A year ago, with the recession in full swing, companies sharply scaled back overall budgets and sales slowed in the final weeks before the game. Still, NBC eventually sold out all of the spots for a record $206 million.
This year's game will be played in Miami on February 7.
(Reporting by Paul Thomasch and Yinka Adegoke, editing by Leslie Gevirtz)
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