Advertising Data Reports and Charts: Prices, Logos, Colours Since 1950
These advertising data reports turn scattered facts into charts you can check: the price of a Super Bowl spot for every game since 1967, how often 26 global and Canadian brands have changed their logos, and which colours led new brand marks in each decade. Every figure traces to a named source, and gaps stay gaps.
Advertising data reports that answer one question each
Most advertising history is told through stories: the famous commercial, the slogan that stuck, the logo everyone remembers. Stories are good at explaining why something mattered. They are bad at telling you how much it cost, how often it changed, or whether a pattern is real. That is the job of the reports collected here.
Each report starts from one question people ask and builds a small dataset. How much did a Super Bowl spot cost in a given year? How often do major brands redraw their logos? Which colours did new brand marks favour in each decade? The answers are charts and a plain note on what the numbers can and cannot show.
The datasets are deliberately modest. Sixty Super Bowl prices, 26 brands, 42 colour records. None of it pretends to be a census of the industry. What it offers instead is advertising data you can trace back, line by line, to a company record, a measurement firm or a news report published at the time.
Super Bowl ad cost: sixty games of prices
The largest report follows the price of a 30-second national commercial during every Super Bowl, from January 1967 to February 2026. It starts at $42,500 on CBS for Super Bowl I and ends at a reported average of $8 million for Super Bowl LX on NBC, with a handful of 2026 spots selling above $10 million.
The chart shows a line that looks smooth from far away and jagged up close. Prices fell in seven years, including 1984, when the average dropped to $368,200 in the same broadcast that carried Apple’s Macintosh launch. The report also converts the prices into 2025 dollars, which shrinks the 188-fold nominal rise to about nineteen times in real terms.
There is a Canadian thread too. The report explains why viewers in Canada usually see different commercials, and why the three games from 2017 to 2019 were the exception. Read it in full in the Super Bowl ad cost report, and see the commercials themselves in the Super Bowl commercials history.
Logo redesign data for 26 brands
The second report asks how often brands change their logos and answers with 26 of them: 18 global and 8 Canadian, from IBM and Google to Canadian Tire and CBC/Radio-Canada. Between 1950 and October 2026 they made 55 documented major changes. The median gap between one logo and the next was 13 years.
The spread is wide. Google and Instagram turned over about every five years in the window, while General Motors went fifty-seven years between its 1964 mark and the 2021 redesign. CN still uses the single-line logo drawn by Allan Fleming in 1960, the longest-standing mark in the sample. Gap’s 2010 logo lasted about a week.
The chart plots every brand as a row with a dot for each change, so clusters and gaps are easy to spot. The 2010s produced more changes than any other decade, a pattern this advertising data shares with the colour report. Full figures and the method are in the logo redesign frequency report.
Brand colours by decade
The third report looks at colour. It takes 42 brand marks introduced or redesigned between 1953 and 2023, four to seven per decade, and assigns each a hue family from its documented colour. Ten of the marks are Canadian, from the Air Canada rondelle of 1964 to the CIBC logo of 2021.
Red is the constant. It appears somewhere in 22 of the 42 marks, as the main colour or as part of a multicolour design, against 12 for blue. Multicolour marks, from NBC’s peacock to Google’s four-colour logo, formed the largest group in three decades. The small 2020s sample leans blue, with Meta and Pepsi.
The colour charts stack each decade’s marks by hue, so you can see the 1980s, five marks in five different colour families, sitting beside the red-heavy 1990s. The full breakdown sits in the brand colours by decade report, and the colour theory guide explains why some of those colour pairings work.
How the advertising data is sourced
Every data point carries its own source. For prices, that means measurement data where it exists, such as Nielsen averages for Super Bowl spots up to 2022, and named news reports where it does not. For logos and colours, it means the company’s own history or press pages first, then major outlets like CBC News, the BBC and CNN.
Listicles, design blogs and agency write-ups are not used, even when they carry a tidy table. Those tables often copy each other, and errors travel with them. One example: the Chase octagon is often dated 1961, while the bank’s own history gives November 1960. The reports follow the primary record when the two disagree.
When sources disagree and neither is clearly primary, the dataset keeps the most widely reported figure and notes the alternative. The 2016 Super Bowl price is the typical case: most outlets reported $5 million, while the Nielsen average was $4.8 million. Both appear in the advertising data file, so a reader can choose.
Reading the charts: samples, floors and averages
Three cautions apply across the reports. First, the logo and colour datasets are samples, not complete histories, so a decade’s leader can change with a single redesign. Second, counts of logo changes are a floor: a change that cannot be confirmed is left out. Third, reported Super Bowl prices are averages, not invoices.
None of that makes the charts weak. It makes them honest about their size. A chart built on 42 verified colour records says less than one built on thousands, but every point in it can be checked. For questions about advertising history, that trade usually favours the smaller, sourced set, at least until a larger one exists.
The timing of each fact can be cross-checked on the advertising timeline, which places campaigns, logos and prices on one axis. As of October 2026, the newest data point in these reports is Super Bowl LX in February, and the newest logo in the colour sample is the black X mark of July 2023.
Questions about the advertising data reports
Where does the advertising data in these reports come from?
Each report lists its sources by data point. Super Bowl prices up to 2022 are Nielsen averages, and later years come from outlets such as ESPN and the Financial Times. Logo and colour records come from company history pages, company releases and major news outlets like CBC News, the BBC, CNN and the Globe and Mail.
How much did a Super Bowl ad cost in 2026?
The reported average for a 30-second national spot during Super Bowl LX on NBC in February 2026 was about $8 million, according to the Financial Times. NBCUniversal said a handful of spots sold for more than $10 million, a first for the game. The full series for all sixty games is in the Super Bowl report.
How often do big brands change their logos?
Across 26 major brands tracked from 1950 to 2026, the median gap between one documented logo and the next was 13 years, and the mean was about 18. Technology brands such as Google and Instagram changed about every five years, while the railway CN has used the same mark since 1960.
What colour do brand logos use most?
In a sample of 42 marks introduced or redesigned between 1953 and 2023, red appears in 22, more than any other hue, and blue in 12. Multicolour marks were the largest single group in the 1960s, 1970s and 2010s, while blue led the small 2020s sample with Meta and Pepsi.
Why do some years or brands not appear in the charts?
A year, a brand or a colour enters a dataset only when a named source confirms it. Where a figure could not be traced, it is left out instead of estimated, so some charts show fewer points than a complete-looking list elsewhere might. Counts in the logo report are therefore a floor, not a ceiling.
How often are the reports updated?
The Super Bowl report is reviewed after each game, once reported prices settle, usually by March. The logo and colour datasets are updated when a brand in the sample announces a new mark, or when a missing year can be confirmed from a company page or a major news outlet. Each page shows its last update date.