NYU Langone Ads Air During Super Bowl
The ads were probably kind of expensive, but weren’t paid for by our tuition.
NYU Langone Medical Center aired two ads during Super Bowl LII on Sunday before a national audience of over 100 million who watched the Philadelphia Eagles beat the New England Patriots and Justin Timberlake desecrate Prince’s legacy.
They were NYU Langone’s first ads to air during a Super Bowl. The commercials did not air nationally, but in the local market. Purchasing local ad space during the Super Bowl is significantly less expensive than purchasing national ad space. In 2014, for example, a 30-second ad buy on the New York affiliate of FOX, who broadcast the Super Bowl that year, had an asking price of $1 million, according to Deadline. A single 30-second national ad buy in the Super Bowl this year went for over $5 million, plus the cost of actually producing the ad.
NYU Langone would not provide an exact cost figure for the ad buy, but in a statement to NYU Local, spokesperson Allison Clair said that student tuition did not pay for them.
“The hospital’s budget is independent of the Washington Square budget,” Clair said. “Student tuition is not related to expenditures by NYU Langone Health.”
The university’s two largest sources of operating revenue are tuition and patient care at the university’s hospital network, with the latter representing more than three times the revenue than the former.
Whether the ad buy was $2 million, $10 million or anything in between, the cost of these ads is small in the grand scheme of NYU’s $12 billion FY2018 budget, which includes the funding for both NYU proper and the Langone Hospital network. But, despite not being funded by tuition, it is representative of what many students and faculty see as the university’s excessive spending on items not related to the education of its students.
One ad was titled “Going With The Flow” and promoted Langone’s orthopedic division. The ad aimed to showcase “New York’s everyday athletes” and featured such athletes as a waitress rescuing a tray from falling to the ground, a man carrying three babies, workers in a manhole, a crossing guard, and a woman on a scooter. It ended with the text “NYU LANGONE ORTHOPEDICS — KEEPING NEW YORK’S EVERYDAY ATHLETES ON THEIR FEET” followed by another black screen with the text “MADE FOR NEW YORK” and the Langone logo.
The other ad was titled “Keeping with the Pace,” and also promoted Langone Orthopedics. This ad featured a pizza delivery man, two men stacking boxes onto a truck, a woman fumbling her phone only for it to be caught by a stranger, and a woman pushing a stroller with four children, ending with the same title cards as “Going with the Flow.”
NYU Langone, named after NYU trustee and Home Depot founder Ken Langone after he donated $200 million to the hospital in 2008, is a nonprofit entity but has helmed several ad campaigns in the past. Langone Orthopedics used a similar ad campaign in 2015, showcasing winter and spring “everyday athletes” performing similar tasks everyday tasks to those in the Super Bowl ad.
NYU Langone takes up the bulk of the university’s budget, with over $8 billion, or 73 percent, budgeted towards the medical school and the hospital network. Meanwhile, the rest of the university gets 27 percent, around $3 billion, of the budget.
In a statement, Clair made the case for buying the ad.
“As an institution, it is of the utmost importance for us to be mindful of how our healthcare dollars are spent, and we strive every day to make that an absolute priority,” Clair said. She went on to say that because NYU Langone is in an “incredibly competitive marketplace,” it needs to “spread the word about the fantastic work that our faculty and staff are doing.”
“The Super Bowl enables us to be in front of millions of potential NYU Langone Health patients with that message,” she continued, “and we’re excited to communicate with a wider audience.”
