If You Invested $1,000 When Apple Aired Its 1984 Super Bowl Ad, Here's How Much You'd Have Now

Super Bowl LVI featured commercials that cost advertisers $6.5 million for a 30-second spot. Some of those ads will be remembered for years, while others will be easily forgotten. Here’s a look at one of the most famous commercials of all-time and the potential massive fortune it made for investors.

What Happened: The 1983 NFL season culminated with Super Bowl XVII, a game which saw the Raiders beating the Redskins 38-9 on Jan. 22, 1984.

The game was watched by over 77 million people on CBS, a unit of ViacomCBS Inc VIAC. A 30-second commercial during the game came at a cost of $368,200.

One company that used the Super Bowl to promote an upcoming product launch was Apple Inc AAPL.

Apple used Super Bowl XVII to launch its national commercial called “1984,” which announced the launch of the Mac computers. The ad was directed by Ridley Scott and featured analogies of Big Brother from the George Orwell novel “1984.”

The commercial may have also poked fun at International Business Machine IBM and provided a warning that Apple was coming after them in the computer sector.

Apple’s commercial is considered by many to be one of the greatest Super Bowl ads of all time, and one of the most talked about and remembered ads of the last several decades.

Related Link: Apple Becomes First Company To Top $3 Trillion Market Cap 

Investing $1,000: The commercial from Apple aired during the third quarter of the Super Bowl. The ad highlighted an upcoming product, which proved to be a major catalyst for Apple.

Anyone watching the commercial who felt like it was well done, might have been convinced that Apple could compete in the computer space, and may have chosen to invest in shares of the company.

Apple traded at a split-adjusted price of $0.13 on the Monday after Super Bowl XVII (Jan. 23, 1984). A $1,000 investment could have purchased 7,692.31 shares of AAPL.

The $1,000 investment in AAPL shares would be wroth $1,331,385 today, based on a price of $173.08 for AAPL shares at the time of writing.

The Super Bowl commercial from Apple was a key event for the company and could have been a key moment for investors who recognized the potential for Apple.

Photo: Courtesy of clio1789 on Flickr