The NFL already commands a disproportionate share of TV’s eyeballs and ad dollars, accounting for the largest audiences of any programming genre and some $5.2 billion in commercial revenue for the league’s media partners. And while the fall TV numbers were expected to enjoy a bit of a bounce in the absence of an attention-draining presidential election cycle, a significant update to Nielsen’s ratings methodology could boost this year’s NFL deliveries to all-time highs.
During the spring/summer upfront bazaar, in which the broadcast and cable networks booked some $17.8 billion in advance commitments for the 2025-26 TV season, Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel currency served as the coin of the realm for buyers and sellers. The refined measurement system enhances the audience intel culled from Nielsen’s legacy panel (sample size: 42,000 homes, or 101,000 consumers) with data sourced via 75 million digital devices, a catchall that includes smart TVs and set-top boxes.
Given the currency upgrade, it stands to reason that the busy fall sports calendar will scare up even bigger ratings this year—although the extent of those anticipated gains remains to be seen. Media buyers suggest that last season’s Thursday Night Football deliveries should provide a general sense of how NFL ratings should fare under the new Nielsen standard; when the souped-up measurement scheme was applied to Amazon’s vanilla Prime Video deliveries, the average game saw a 7.8% lift in overall impressions.
In absolute terms, the weekly TNF audience grew from an average draw of 13.2 million viewers under the sunsetting panel-only estimates to 14.2 million upon application of the new Big Data wrinkle. A proportional uptick in impressions would see the NFL’s national Sunday games on CBS, Fox and NBC gain anywhere from 1.6 million to 2.4 million viewers per broadcast, a data-driven improvement that has the potential to drive the average audience for the big 4:20 p.m. ET games beyond the 26 million mark.
While buyers caution that each window is likely to experience different rates of change versus last season, the projected gains for the two national Sunday broadcasts alone would likely make the fall campaign the most-watched NFL season on the books. (The number to beat: 18.1 million viewers per game in 2015-16, a figure that includes the 1 p.m. ET regional windows.) And while the prospect of growing an already mammoth audience is a welcome development, given the ongoing erosion of U.S. TV usage, the currency shift has injected a layer of complexity into the process of setting ad rates and ratings projections.
Buyers surveyed over the last several weeks have offered a range of projections for the coming NFL season, with some shops anticipating a more modest overall gain for in-game deliveries (+3%) while others suggesting that Big Data will swell the TV numbers by an Amazonian +8%. While both sides of the transactional table have been furnished with Big Data estimates for the better part of the last year, some buyers have said that there are a few inconstancies in certain dayparts that have made it a challenge to get a read on how the gains in the regional windows might shake out compared to the big national games.
That said, while there’s some element of “bounce” in last year’s enhanced data set, as results for certain windows are said to have deviated from the trend line, buyers and sellers say they’re confident in their projections for Big Data’s inaugural. If nothing else, the speed in which the sports inventory flew off the shelf during the upfront not only speaks volumes about demand, but also suggests that investors and suppliers were largely in agreement on pricing and guarantees. (A fractious upfront is a sweaty upfront, as disputes about the most elemental aspects of the bazaar can extend talks through late August. In recent years, however, the indispensable nature of the NFL has ensured a swift-running sports bazaar, as the risk of missing out on all those insured ratings points—pricy scatter buys aren’t transacted against ratings guarantees—tends to keep the advance ad exchange flowing merrily along.)
The networks are confident that the new currency will go a long way toward boosting their NFL numbers, as ad sales execs say they’ve had sufficient impact data on which to model their fall projections. “Our research team built that data into our pricing structure and the ratings estimates,” Ryan Briganti, head of CBS Sports ad sales, said during an interview last week. “In the beginning there was a lot of feeling each other out, buyer and seller, and it took a lot of conversation and dialogue to make sure we were seeing the same numbers on both sides. But we feel like we’ve all got a handle on what’s coming.”
While the networks don’t provide guidance on year-to-year pricing variations—when asked about CBS’ average unit cost for its NFL games, Briganti merely said, “Higher than last year”—buyers and sellers alike confirm that the currency switch did not lead to price gouging.
“We didn’t look at this as an opportunity to really jack up the prices or take a pound of flesh,” Briganti said. “Like any other year, we negotiated in good faith.”
For their part, buyers say that the average NFL CPM, or the price of reaching 1,000 viewers, is up between 7% and 9% compared to last year’s upfront rates.
Tony Taranto, who leads CBS’ NFL sales efforts, acknowledged that the currency shift presented the usual difficulties that come when Nielsen changes the way it counts the house. “The hardest thing to do is the first year of any new deal,” Taranto said during the network’s in-house NFL media session. “You don’t want to be significantly wrong one way or the other. The risk is too great.”
As it happens, the biggest danger facing a network in a time of relative uncertainty is underestimating the deliveries. If your ratings projections are meaningfully lower than the actual deliveries, you’re leaving an awful lot of money on the table.
As such, the rule of thumb is to overpromise rather than come in shy of the transactional metrics; worse comes to worst, you make the client whole with make-good units. Aim too low on your guarantees, however, and advertisers are effectively making off with armloads of free inventory. It’s far better to fork over the ADUs (audience-deficiency units) than to give the store away.
As much as buyers and sellers seem confident they’ll hit their pricing and audience targets, Briganti acknowledged that nobody will really have a handle on how things will shake out until the first batch of Big Data-enhanced ratings lands in September. “We think we know how everything will play out, but we can’t be 100% sure until the numbers actually get sent over on Tuesday mornings,” he said. “But again, we’re confident with our modeling.”
Briganti and his team may have to wait a bit longer to get the first taste of next-gen NFL ratings data, however, as Nielsen has indicated that the Big Data flex will likely necessitate some additional processing time. But it’s not as if everyone involved in that $5.2 billion market will be sweating out an eternity of hang time; the very first reports on this season’s Sunday NFL numbers are expected to land on Wednesday, Sept. 10, or just a day after the old panel-only deliveries would have dropped.