It should come as no surprise, but buying advertising against NFL programming is very effective.
According to a new report by Anthony Crupi of Sportico, commercials during NFL games are more impactful than your standard-fare primetime television commercial by a factor of 23. Yes, that’s right. A 30-second ad during an afternoon NFL game is 23-times more valuable than a 30-second during a broadcast network’s primetime programming.
Of course, a large part of this discrepancy is the sheer volume of people that watch NFL games (about 24 million on average during the late-afternoon Sunday window) compared to network primetime (about 3.33 million people). But that’s only about a factor of seven. What creates the rest of the discrepancy?
Well, per Crupi, it’s a number of factors. For one, 99% of NFL viewers are watching live, therefore they’re more likely to sit through and consume the advertising put in front of them. There’s also the scarcity factor. Sunday NFL audiences are only available for one day per week, 22 weeks per year. With so few opportunities available, advertisers are willing to pay a premium for the inventory.
Fox’s late-afternoon national window games this year sold for about $1.1 million per 30-second spot during upfront season in the spring. Compare that to Fox’s Sunday primetime show during last NFL season, The Simpsons, which sold a 30-second ad for around $48,000 a piece, and it becomes clear just how essential NFL programming is for these networks.
And for advertisers, the high price of NFL ads seems to make sense from a data perspective. Crupi reports that if an advertiser had chosen to spend $1.1 million on advertising during The Simpsons last season, they would’ve accumulated about 20.8 million live impressions. That same $1.1 million spend, good for one 30-second NFL ad, would generate about 24 million impressions.
550 brands purchased commercial inventory during NFL games last year, with networks raking in a combined $5.2 billion, per Sportico. For reference, networks pay about $10 billion combined each year for broadcast rights to NFL games. The vast majority of that value for the networks is realized via retransmissions fees from distributors, which is difficult to put an exact number on. However, $5.2 billion is a pretty solid supplement to that revenue stream, and shows just how powerful the NFL business is.