The Game Around the Game: How the Super Bowl Became a Cultural Event

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Super Bowl halftime show spent its first quarter century as a modest affair built around marching bands and drill teams, closer to a college bowl game tradition than to what the show later became. That changed at Super Bowl XXVII in January 1993, when the NFL booked Michael Jackson for the halftime performance and television ratings for the show itself spiked sharply above the game's own numbers; the league has booked major recording artists for the slot every year since, turning the halftime show into a headline booking that performers now actively compete for.

Commercial airtime during the broadcast followed a similar path from afterthought to spectacle. Advertisers now treat a Super Bowl spot as a marketing event in its own right, commanding some of the highest rates of any advertising slot on American television and prompting companies to produce commercials specifically built to be discussed and shared long after the game ends, rather than simply to sell during it. The game itself has become an unofficial American holiday despite carrying no formal holiday status, reliably ranking among the most watched television broadcasts of any kind in the United States each year it airs, and generating its own secondary traditions, from elaborate party spreads to workplace jokes about absenteeism the following Monday.