It’s just been announced that Cher will be coming out of retirement to sing at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I’ve been watching the parade on Thanksgiving morning since I was a kid, and absolutely love their guest appearance (not to mention when Santa comes on at the end).
They say timing is everything in showbiz, and Cher must have some of the best timing around. Cher just released her first new album in five years called “Christmas”, and she’s expected to drop a 25th anniversary edition of her 1998 mega hit “Believe” today.
I thought it’d be interesting to do a deeper dive into Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with some mind blowing stats of how they pull it off each year:
- Annual costs for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade exceed $13 Million.
- Annual costs for the parade’s float supplies, decorations, property taxes, and staff salaries typically total $2.7 million to $4.5 million.
- The parade generates an estimated $12 million from food, transit and spending on local retail along the route.
- The parade also has sponsors who generate around $5 million in direct activities via expenditures on marketing.
- Visitors and sponsors combined generate an estimate of $6 million dollars and roughly $1million from city tax revenues.
- The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade makes an estimated range of $20 million to $24.1 million from advertising and their deal with NBC.
- The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has on average more than 50 million viewers and 3.5 million individuals attending the event in person.
- In 2019, NBC generated an estimated $49.2 million in ad revenue from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, while The National Dog Show (which comes on TV right after coverage of the parade ends) brought in $11.7 million and the prime-time NFL game … yielded $72.1 million. That’s close to $133 million in ad revenue for the three events that day alone.