A New Sport — In TV Circles Insurance Tops Beer

Sports programming used to be dominated by beer commercials. Not anymore. Anyone watching the recently concluded National Football League playoff and the Superbowl know that to be true.

Insurance now rules sports programming.

The New York Post recently took a look at just how much energy and money insurance is putting into sports. In 2021 TV sports programming saw close to 15,560 beer commercials on the four largest TV networks:

ESPN

CNN

MSNBC

Fox News

In terms of total minutes, cut that in half since most TV commercials are 30-seconds. That’s a lot of time. Not close — it appears — to what insurance did in 2021. Media advertising analyst iSport said on those same networks there was 109,297 minutes of insurance advertising. That’s a 52.3% increase from what was aired in 2016’s paltry 71,000 minutes.

Beer commercials — says iSpot — remained at about 7,000 minutes.