The National Football League postseason kicked off this past weekend, with 14 teams setting their sights on the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
But according to our predictive outcomes data, advertisers on NFL telecasts may have been silently pulling for a rematch of Super Bowl LVII last season between Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles — at least until the Eagles were eliminated by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this past Monday.
According to our analysis, ads that ran during Chiefs games during the 2023 regular season were more likely to generate consumer engagement than all but one NFL team, and the Eagles clocked in as the league’s fifth most-engaging team. The Chiefs and Eagles were joined in our top five by two non-playoff teams and red-hot Buffalo Bills, who cannot play fellow American Football Conference club Kansas City in the Super Bowl.
The analysis was conducted using our Engagement Rate Index metric, which calculates how likely a viewer is to search for a given brand or visit its website in the moments after the brand airs a national TV ad.
NFL (Taylor’s Version): Swift, Kelce brothers boost ad effectiveness in 2023
While 100% of the participants in NFL games to date have been men, two women have their fingerprints all over the engagement surge by the Chiefs and Eagles.
Two brothers squared off in last year’s Big Game — Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and Eagles center Jason Kelce — and their mother, Donna Kelce, became a fixture in coverage of the game, appearing in spots for brands like Chunky and Pfizer.
That paled in comparison to the hype when Travis Kelce began dating pop superstar Taylor Swift during the 2023 regular season, leading to a dramatic increase in the Chiefs among the press, the public, and Taylor’s worldwide fanbase of Swifties.
According to an EDO analysis from this past October, the new relationship drove an increase in consumer engagement for ads from the brands Pfizer and Cambell’s that featured Travis Kelce. Meanwhile, 2023 NFL regular-season games were 8% more effective at driving engagement during the 2023 season than the previous year.
The top five teams in terms of ad effectiveness this season were:
- Minnesota Vikings, 32% above the NFL regular-season average
- Chiefs, 31%
- Denver Broncos, 29%
- Bills, 25%
- Eagles, 21%
Southern divisions bring up the rear in 2023 ad effectiveness rankings
On the opposite end of the spectrum, fans were 14% less engaged with ads during telecasts of Houston Texans games and 8% less engaged with broadcasts of Buccaneers contests, despite those teams winning their respective divisions and qualifying for the postseason.
The Texans and Bucs were champions of the AFC South and National Football Conference South, respectively, and EDO found that eight of the 10 teams with the lowest engagement this season came from those two divisions.
Thursday Is the New Sunday?
The top three NFL regular season games during the 2023 campaign, in terms of ad engagement as calculated via EDO’s ERI, turned out to be the season’s first three Thursday-night games:
- New York Giants at San Francisco 49ers, Sept. 21, 95% more engagement than the average NFL regular-season game, Amazon Prime Video
- Vikings at Eagles, Sept. 14, 88%, Amazon Prime Video
- Detroit Lions at Chiefs, Sept. 7, 87%, NBC and Peacock
Bonkers for Gronk
According to EDO’s analysis of top creatives featuring NFL players, and how they compared with average ads during NFL regular-season telecasts, three retired players kept pace with some of the league’s current superstars.
The top five spots were:
- USAA, Serve, featuring former New England Patriots and Buccaneers tight end Rob Gronkowski, 891%
- Subway, Proferred by the Pros, featuring Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and Los Angeles Chargers QB Justin Herbert, 362%
- Geico, New Play Name, featuring former Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams tackle Andrew Whitworth, 272%
- Little Caesars, 4-Quarter Calzony, featuring New Orleans Saints defensive end Cam Jordan, San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle and retired QB Ryan Fitzpatrick, who played for nine NFL teams, 133%
- State Farm, Mantra, featuring Mahomes, 66%
Know who really won the Super Bowl — sign up for our Super Bowl Ad Ranker
Speaking of the NFL postseason, a champion will be crowned in Las Vegas Feb. 11, and the Super Bowl advertising winners will be crowned shortly thereafter using EDO’s Super Bowl LVIII Ad Ranker.
Data on the most effective advertisers, celebrities, and creatives, as well as links to every Super Bowl ad, will be delivered to inboxes of people who sign up by the morning after the Big Game. Sign up to receive your copy today.