How Much Did Temu Pay For Its 2024 Super Bowl Commercials?

Super Bowl LVIII set a new record as the most watched TV program in U.S. history. According to Nielsen Media Research, the sports event recorded a staggering 123.7 million viewers across television and streaming platforms. That's the kind of audience that brands worldwide would pay a premium to reach with their ads, and this year Temu did just that. The Chinese e-commerce company seized the opportunity and secured a total of five ad slots — three during the game and two after — all in a bid to gain a bigger market share in the U.S.

The 30-second commercial reinforced Temu's primary value offer: Find your desired products and acquire them for unbelievably cheap prices. All five slots repeated the same animated shopper magically transforming entire homes, streets, and lives, all with items that cost less than $10. "Shop like a billionaire," the tagline read, but some consumer critics might question which billionaires would furnish their homes with these "too good to be true" products. Others might instead wonder how much this entire ad campaign must have cost, and how effective it all was for Temu's bottom line.

Ad slots for the Super Bowl cost between $6.5 million to $7 million a pop, per CNN. Going by those numbers, Temu spent approximately $15 million on its in-game commercials. Apart from the main ad spend, the company also splurged on an additional $15 million in giveaways and coupons as part of the campaign. It is unclear how much the post-game ads cost.

Data from Sprout Social indicates that the expense might have paid off. Behind Verizon, Temu's ad was talked about more than any others, garnering 40,448 mentions and 420,714 engagements on social media after it aired. Some of the posts featured users asking, "WTF is Temu?," but any publicity is good publicity, right? App downloads also surged, shooting Temu up to second place on the Top Free Apps Charts on the App Store that week, and to the coveted number one spot as at the time of writing.

This marks a turnaround for Temu, whose initial popularity began to wane following reports of poor customer satisfaction, privacy issues, and even a variety of scams. Online chatter continues to warn potential shoppers to be cautious when using Temu, and it doesn't help that the company's Better Business Bureau rating is a disappointing 2.5 stars. Despite these issues, SensorTower data cited by CNN shows that Temu now boasts 70 million monthly active users in the U.S., a significant increase from just 13 million a year ago. 

At the very least we've all learned that we've been pronouncing the brand name wrong all this time. It's "Teh-moo," if you were wondering.