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The 2012 Grammys Are Costing Brands a Fortune

While you’re stuffing your faces with chips (and the dyed-black deviled Skrilleggs you made for your Skrillex-themed Grammy party — no? just us? — and laughing-to-keep-from-crying at the tremendously ill-advised pairing of legendary Beach Boys with Foster the People and Maroon 5 Sunday night at the Grammys, we thought you ought to know what paid for your evening’s entertainment. Every commercial spot that interrupts your yapping about the night’s pop extravagance cost its company about $800,000, according to media-buying execs who talked to Billboard.biz.

In 2010 — the year Taylor Swift’s Fearless took home Album of the Year and the Kings of Leon got massively drunk — the cost of a commercial spot during the Grammys broadcast cost an all-time low of $426,000 because 2009 earned the show a dismal audience of just 19.2 million. To everyone’s surprise, though, viewership in ’10 rose 35 percent, pulling in 26 million viewers, according to the New York Times. In other words, advertisers got an insanely good deal out of the 2010 Grammy Awards. And it only got better: Last year’s CBS broadcast of the awards raked in a whopping 26.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen ratings, which was the highest viewership the awards have seen in the past 10 years.

So it makes a bunch of ad $en$e that brand sponsors’ eyes would bug out of their skulls and jump on that Grammy gravy train right now — that is, if they hadn’t already. This year, live-tweeting Grammy parties across the country can expect to be smacked in the face repeatedly by the same Pepsi, Ford, and GM touts (the Grammys official sponsor and "automotive partners," respectively) — because they paid for it, damn it. Not as much as they paid for a Super Bowl commercial, of course. Those spots run up to $3.5 million per 30 seconds. But the Grammys are still running people $26,667 per second!