The NFL has met its greatest broadcast rival, and it is NFL streaming.
Today, television data and analytics firm EDO released its third annual NFL TV Outcomes Report to ADWEEK with what’s become a foregone conclusion: NFL broadcasts are a far more effective tool for advertisers than anything on television. EDO estimates that the NFL brought in $5.2 billion annually in national TV ads and, during the 2024 season alone, hosted ads that were 19% more effective than the TV average during its regular season, 63% more effective during the playoffs, and 243% more compelling on Super Bowl Sunday.
The NFL’s 550 regular-season brand advertisers in 2024 would’ve needed to run 23 ads on television just to have the impact of one NFL ad.
But during the 2024-25 season, NFL streaming-exclusive games proved even stronger at the line of scrimmage for advertisers than the league’s already-dominant linear offerings. NFL ads running during those games were 66% more effective for brands than broadcast and cable offerings, with certain events providing even heavier hits.
“The NFL is so important to the TV ecosystem overall that it is, on average, more effective than all other types of advertising on TV,” said Kevin Krim, president and CEO of EDO. “The big push for the NFL has been to add streaming exclusives as a way to keep up with the evolution of where the audiences are going, which is to a streaming-first ecosystem.”
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While Amazon Prime Video added a Wild Card playoff game to its Thursday Night Football slate last year, it was the second installment of its Black Friday game that proved extremely potent—with ads 51% more effective than those that ran during the NFL’s highly viewed Thanksgiving games. Over on Netflix, the NFL’s first Christmas Day games were 84% more effective for entertainment brands and 70% more so for pharmaceuticals than the average 2024 NFL broadcast.
Heading into the 2025 season, with a Week 1 game from Sao Paulo set for YouTube and an expanded partnership with ESPN holding additional potential, the EDO report suggests that brands can score big if they find the right fit with the league, its media partners, or even the right athlete endorsers.
“The NFL is the most sophisticated and the most effective in managing its media rights,” Krim said. “They’re the biggest, and yet they’re still setting the tone for every other league and every other live event.”
Making clutch plays
YouTube received a preview of what the NFL’s Week 1 Brazil game could do last year, when EDO found a matchup between the Green Bay Packers and eventual Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles created significant engagement for brands including Applebee’s, Little Caesars, and Subway.
Those streaming-exclusive moments and other big-ticket offerings like the Black Friday and Christmas games offer streamers hints of the league’s greater potential throughout the year. As Amazon discovered during the Wild Card round of the playoffs last year, however, those ads are an average of 68% more effective than the average TV spot, which means you’d need 81 regular TV ads to get the impact of even one Wild Card commercial.
The ESPN direct-to-consumer service and enhanced app will launch on Aug. 21.
That playoff power continues through the divisional rounds, where ads are 51% more effective than television, and the conference championships—where they’re 75% more valuable. An ad in each of those rounds is worth 111 to 218 average prime-time ads in terms of impact with consumers.
For entire segments of business, that makes a game-changing difference. Financial services brands, including American Express and SoFi, watch their ads become 27% more effective during the NFL regular season and 47% during the playoffs. That pattern repeats for food and beverage brands like M&M’s, Coca-Cola, and Gatorade (8% regular season, 34% playoffs); home and personal care, including Hims and Dior (13% and 14%); insurers such as Aflac and GEICO (19% and 56%); luxury automakers such as Polestar and Volvo (42% and 62%); and various restaurants, including Taco Bell and Arby’s (69% and 143%).
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For categories like pharmaceuticals, where direct-to-consumer brand Hims & Hers saw 771% more engagement during the Super Bowl than the average big-game ad, the diversification of NFL broadcast, streaming, and cable options offers a unique opportunity.
“Traditionally, there’s been a lot of hesitance to pay higher rates to advertise a specific drug compound, because, in almost any case, you’re going to get a small fraction of the total population for whom that’s applicable,” Krim said. “Streaming introduces the opportunity for these big pharma companies, who have multiple compounds that can be targeted at different conditions, to buy a slot and target different folks.”
Star performances
Meanwhile, if brands are wondering what’s the best way to connect with those football audiences once you’ve landed an NFL ad, casting a football player or coach never hurts.
EDO found that ads featuring an NFL player that air during regular-season games are 13% more effective than NFL game ads that don’t—and that Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes aren’t going anywhere. Despite dropping the Super Bowl to the Eagles, Mahomes makes ads for Dick’s Sporting Goods, State Farm, Subway, and Adidas that are 21% more effective than the average NFL regular-season ad.
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Kelce’s spots for Lowe’s, Pepsi, and Subway, meanwhile, are 37% more powerful than the standard alternative, while coach Andy Reid’s appearances for Snickers and State Farm are a whopping 67% more effective.
However, EDO noted that brands shouldn’t feel the need to limit the NFL gameday roster to the same vetted rotation of players. Taco Bell’s use of then-New York Jets wideout Davante Adams in an ad about putting a Taco Bell in his house (the “Cheaters Get No Chicken” spot) outpaced any other NFL athlete endorsement last year, proving 124% more effective than a typical regular season ad.
“Celebrities are here to stay when it comes to big-event advertising, and they are a key way to connect with fans, yet there’s a right way to do it,” Krim said. “You need authenticity with the connection to your brand and the creative idea being conveyed in the ad… [and] you do have to be careful about overexposure—we see just generally that the higher the frequency of an ad appearing in front of someone, the less effective it becomes over time.”
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