US pizza restaurant spending

For nineteen years, the cost of a 30-second Super Bowl advertisement and American spending at pizza restaurants tracked each other with an r of 0.97, which is either the most American correlation ever recorded or proof that pizza companies are setting ad rates. One could construct a perfectly plausible theory in which pizza restaurant profits fund Super Bowl ad purchases, which drive pizza awareness, which funds more ads, in an eternal cheesy loop. The truly unsettling possibility is that this feedback mechanism is real. Madison Avenue has been operating a pizza perpetual motion machine.

Both Super Bowl ad costs and pizza restaurant spending are closely tied to US nominal GDP and consumer spending trends. Super Bowl 30-second spots rose from roughly $2.4 million in 2005 to over $6.5 million by 2023, tracking the premium placed on mass simultaneous audiences in an era of fragmented media. Pizza restaurant spending grew similarly as casual dining expenditure expanded with disposable income. Both are also highly sensitive to inflation, which accelerated particularly in 2021-2023 and pushed both figures upward. The Super Bowl is, after all, the single largest pizza consumption day in America, making the industries structurally linked.

Some correlations are spurious and some are just two gauges measuring the same underlying pressure. The art is in knowing which is which, and the humbling truth is that the data alone cannot tell you.