By Charlene Weisler

One of the best places to view the Super Bowl game is in a bar, but until recently, this large OOH audience could not be adequately measured. One company, Tunity, has been measuring out of home for a couple of years and released their Super Bowl data results.

Super Bowl 2019

Paul Lindstrom, Head of Research and Analytics, Tunity, noted that Super Bowl viewing both this year and last “had its greatest usage in bars and restaurants, as one would expect.” And while they do not have commercial log information at this time, they found that program versus commercials performed similarly. The reason is logical in many ways, according to Lindstrom. “In a curated environment you can’t change channels in the same way that you do at home. This means that the commercials are more likely to be on the screen and the screen continuing to remain on the show in question. Also, OOH is fundamentally all live therefore there is no dealing with DVR playback, etc. The differences in audience minute to minute are going to be with audience migration to or away from the set/location.”

2018 vs 2019 Super Bowl OOH

Lindstrom reported that last year, Tunity saw an average 21,026,860 OOH viewers to the NBC telecast of the Super Bowl. This year, the average was 23,672,607 OOH viewers to the CBS telecast – an increase of +12.5%.  

He pointed out that “this is not the pattern that has been indicated by Nielsen for in-home estimates. I suspect that there is a difference in the in-home versus OOH environments, where in a situation like the Super Bowl, people plan to be there and are committed to a certain length of time. It is less subject to the vagaries of people deciding to turn off a game when they are home on their own.”

The Super Bowl is by far the largest OOH event measured with year to year growth. Lindstrom has no doubt that the game was the highest measured audience ever since Tunity began reporting.