State Farm drops Super Bowl ad plans after wildfires

State Farm has decided not to air an advertisement during Super Bowl LIX next month.

“Our focus is firmly on providing support to the people of Los Angeles,” a company spokesperson told FOX Business on Thursday. “We will not be advertising during the game as originally planned.”

The insurance company’s decision, first reported by Ad Age, comes as the Los Angeles area has been contending with wildfires that have left at least 25 people dead since Jan. 7. The flames from the largest blaze, the Palisades Fire, have damaged or destroyed some 5,000 buildings alone.

Super Bowl LIX is slated to take place Feb. 9 in New Orleans. Spots for ads during the championship game are highly coveted each year. 

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State Farm and its agents and employees are “all focused on helping customers impacted by the Southern California wildfires in the midst of this tragedy,” the State Farm spokesperson said.

“State Farm serves more [than] 8 million customers in California — more than any other insurer — and we’ve been doing this for nearly 100 years,” the spokesperson told FOX Business. “Our claims force is the largest in the industry and we are bringing the full scale and force of our catastrophe response teams to help customers recover — whether they are on the ground in LA or across the country.”

The insurance company has fielded more than 7,850 home and auto claims and “put around $50 Million back into customers’ hands” as of Thursday morning, according to the spokesperson. It expects those figures to go up “as residents return and assess damage.”

More than 1 million homes and 4 million vehicles are insured by State Farm in the Golden State, including 250,000 homes and 880,000 cars in Los Angeles County, per the company. 

State Farm announced in March 2024 that it would discontinue coverage of 72,000 home and apartment policies in California in the summer. The company cited inflation, regulatory costs and increasing risk of catastrophes for its decision and had previously stopped accepting new applications in the state.

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Earlier this week, the company said Los Angeles-area homeowners with policies “on the books” on Jan. 7 that have been hit by the wildfires would receive policy renewal offers, pumping the brakes on the “notification process on homeowner non-renewals” in the flame-stricken areas. 

Three of the wildfires active in the Los Angeles area have been raging for more than a week. Those blazes — the Palisades, Eaton and Hurst fires — were 22%, 55% and 98% contained, respectively, as of Thursday afternoon, per Cal Fire. Another fire, which started in Ventura County on Monday, has 85% containment.

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Nearly 38,700 acres have been burned by the four fires.

Eric Revell contributed to this report.