Steve Cohen Buys Mets Super Bowl Ad, Will Air Locally in NYC Market

This year's Super Bowl advertisements will feature the usual suspects of beer, cars, chips and...the New York Mets?

Mets owner Steve Cohen purchased a 30-second commercial that will be played in the New York area near the end of the first quarter of Sunday's game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs, via Evan Drellich of The Athletic.

The Mets declined to specify the cost, but Drellich reported the "total value of the inventory was $1.5 million." Andrew Marchand of the New York Post reported the Mets paid about $1 million to run the spot, "with additional placements bringing the total value of the buy to $1.5 million."

Cohen and the Mets have not been shy about spending money after a free-agent spree that featured the additions of Justin Verlander, Kodai Senga and Jose Quintana, plus the re-signing of Edwin Diaz and Brandon Nimmo. The team has the highest projected payroll in the majors for 2023 at $336 million.

Nimmo, Senga, Diaz and Francisco Lindor are among those featured in the "This is SportsCenter"-style commercial.

Creating a Super Bowl advertisement is still a strange move for any sports organization. As Mets' chief marketing officer Andy Goldberg explained, the strategy is to grow the team's brand.

"You go around the world, and you see people and they're wearing Yankee hats," Goldberg said, per Drellich. "They're not wearing Yankee hats because they're Yankee fans, just to be clear. They're wearing Yankee hats because it's an 'NY,' and New York is cool, right? I want that to be a Met hat, 100 percent."

Goldberg believes the investment is the start of something bigger.

"This is the first flag planted in a fundamentally core direction that we want to go in."