The NFL is the long-reigning champion of TV advertising, but it’s staggering to see exactly how dominant our unofficial national pastime is in the media marketplace.
According to EDO’s latest NFL TV Outcomes Report, the League accounted for five of the year’s 15 most impactful TV broadcasts for advertisers — and the average game generated nearly 36x more ad engagement than the primetime broadcast and cable average. In each instance, we measure ad impact by a broadcast’s ability to generate ad-driven consumer engagement — behavioral signals like brand searches that are proven predictors of future sales.
While the NFL’s ability to drive outcomes for advertisers is undisputed, there is still plenty of variance in ad effectiveness. As we embark on a new season, marketers should know the key trends and new wrinkles that could make or break their 2024 NFL campaigns.
With that in mind, here are four NFL ad effectiveness trends TV marketers should keep their eyes on as they fine-tune their ad plans this season.
It’s a streaming-first world, and we’re marching further into it for the 2024 NFL season, with the League announcing in May that its two marquee Christmas Day games will air exclusively on Netflix.
The Netflix games mark an expansion of the NFL’s streaming-only slate, which now includes Christmas Day on Netflix, as well as Thursday Night Football, Black Friday, and a wild-card playoff on Amazon Prime Video, AND an exclusive regular season game on Peacock.
This expansion is good news for TV advertisers, as we’ve found NFL ads perform especially well inside of streaming’s highly engaging environment.
In fact, this past season, ads on Amazon’s Thursday Night Football were 14% more likely to generate consumer engagement than the average primetime NFL ad and 70% more effective than the average primetime ad. Thursday Night Football ads were particularly potent in the insurance and automotive categories, whose advertisers were 180% and 146% more effective than the primetime TV benchmark, respectively.
Speaking of the NFL’s Christmas Day slate, the holiday season offers brands some of the most effective games of the year. For instance, ads during last year’s Christmas Day game between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers were 75% more effective than the primetime average.
Retailers, in particular, feasted during the holiday season. Walmart was a staggering 3,623% more effective than the average advertiser during the NFL’s Thanksgiving Day games, and a Kohl’s ad promoting its Black Friday deals generated 801% more impact than the average ad during the NFL’s Thanksgiving and Christmas Day games.
The combination of strong performance on streaming and during the holidays bodes very well for Netflix’s NFL debut this Christmas.
When it comes to NFL ad creative, context is key. Our data consistently finds that ads featuring NFL players outperform those without.
For example, dating back to 2020, viewers have been 89% more likely to engage with a leading insurance brand’s football-themed ads during the NFL playoffs than with the brand’s ads that did not feature football during the playoffs. EDO’s NFL analysis further details how brands like USAA (Rob Gronkowski), Bud Light (Peyton Manning and Emmitt Smith), and Old El Paso (the Watt brothers) used past and present stars to achieve effective performance results last season.
And of course, the more relevant an ad is to the precise context in which it airs, the more effective it can be. But now brands have the data to prove it. When Lexus aired a custom spot featuring Green Bay Packers legend Clay Matthews during a Packers appearance on Thursday Night Football, we found that consumers were more than 17x as likely to engage than with the average Lexus ad.
Games with tighter margins yield more engaging — and effective — ads. If you’re planning a scatter buy during this NFL season, you’re better off advertising during matchups that folks expect to come down to the wire.
Of 12,000+ ads that ran during primetime NFL games during last year’s regular season, we found that games with a score differential of eight or fewer points by the end of the third quarter had a significant advantage for advertisers. In these games, ads were 7% more effective than those during games with a margin of 9-16 points going into the final quarter, and 12% more effective than those with margins of 17 or greater.
We selected an eight-point margin for analysis because it indicated that a game was tied, or at a point where the losing team could tie or go ahead with a touchdown and a two-point conversion. When fans know that a single drive can alter the outcome of the game in the final quarter, they’re more likely to stay locked in — with both the game and the TV creatives that run during the ad breaks.
As modern marketers become ever more sophisticated, and the NFL’s reach extends into our streaming hearts and minds, NFL advertising is only becoming more competitive.
To drive results and top the competition, advertisers need fast, reliable ad performance data that can tell them how they’re doing in time to adjust their game plans for the following week’s kickoff.
After all, the Super Bowl will be here before you know it — and you’ll want to make sure your playbook is ready for primetime.