NFL ADS DELIVER BIG RETURNS. BUT WHICH NUMBERS CAN MARKETERS TRUST?

New data shows huge returns from NFL advertising as fragmented distribution complicates how marketers evaluate audience, placement and performance.

With the NFL season starting this week, brands are once again paying a premium to get in front of football’s massive audiences. New data suggests there is good reason for the competition: the average regular-season NFL ad generated the same impact as 73 typical primetime ads during the 2025-26 season, up 15% year over year.

EDO, a TV outcomes company that measures how advertising affects consumer behavior, analyzed every national TV ad that aired during the season. The advantage grew during the postseason, with the average playoff ad delivering the impact of 172 primetime ads and the average Super Bowl spot matching 1,455.

“Today’s audiences have more choices than ever, yet premium content continues to command engagement at an unmatched scale. Within that landscape, the NFL remains TV’s most-watched programming event – and continues to prove that the biggest audiences also drive meaningful consumer action long after the final whistle,” says Jim Minnich, SVP of revenue and yield management at Disney Advertising.

But knowing NFL advertising performs well is only part of the equation. Results vary by category, placement and format, while games are distributed across broadcast networks and streaming services. For marketers trying to determine what they are getting for their money, evaluating an NFL buy increasingly requires looking past one big audience or performance number.

Not all NFL ad dollars perform the same

Every category EDO measured performed better during NFL programming than against its own primetime benchmark, although the size of that advantage varied considerably. Pharma led during the regular season, with ads performing 95% better than the category’s primetime broadcast and cable average. QSR ads were 54% more effective, while internet/telecom came in 24% higher.

“Every category is different, which is why brands need to pay attention to category-level benchmarks,” says Kevin Krim, CEO of EDO.
Format can change the outcome, too. For its first NFL sponsorship analysis, EDO measured 1,443 on-screen sponsorships across 79 nationally televised games. Halftime studio-show segments performed 198% better than the average NFL sponsorship unit, compared with 58% for halftime signage and 28% for sponsor billboards.

Krim says brands should consider traditional commercials and integrations together. EDO found that halftime studio-show integrations were 30% more effective when paired with an adjacent standard ad from the same brand than when they appeared alone.

Placement gets even more granular during the Super Bowl. The first ad in a commercial pod generated 1.7 times the engagement of ads appearing later in the same break, while some late-pod spots performed 10% below the baseline Super Bowl ad. Roughly half of the incremental lift EDO identified came from how exciting the game was, leaving media placement and creative execution among the factors advertisers can control.

Those findings give marketers a more detailed picture of what happens after an NFL ad reaches consumers. But there is another number behind every media buy: the audience itself. And as NFL games are watched across very different broadcast and streaming environments, defining and comparing that audience becomes another part of the equation.

When is an NFL viewer actually a viewer?

The performance of an ad is one way to judge an NFL investment. The size of the audience it reached is another. But Dan Rayburn, a streaming media analyst who has spent more than 25 years tracking the economics and technology of online video, says that number can be harder to interpret than it appears.

“In the industry, we can’t even count. We don’t even know what a viewer is,” Rayburn says.

Part of the problem is that audience reporting can rely on different metrics. Rayburn points to total audience delivery, average minute audience, simultaneous streams and concurrent streams as examples. Each describes viewing differently, yet the resulting figures can end up being used to compare the reach of games and platforms.

Amazon’s Thursday Night Football offers one example of how streaming complicates the definition. Rayburn notes that a game can appear in a window while someone is shopping on Amazon. If that shopper never interacts with the game and leaves after several seconds, he asks, should that person be counted as a viewer?

The question becomes more consequential as NFL rights span services with different viewing environments. Rayburn points to YouTube’s NFL broadcast last season, when the company revised its initially reported audience upward by roughly 2 million viewers several days after the game. For advertisers, he says, a correction of that size raises questions about how audience delivery is calculated and what happens when those figures change after the inventory has already been sold.

Measurement methodology adds another wrinkle. Rayburn says some NFL audiences are measured using Nielsen panels, while others may incorporate additional data or custom measurement approaches. That can make year-over-year and platform-to-platform comparisons difficult to interpret without knowing exactly how each figure was produced.

“So how are we comparing this year over year?” he says.

The issue isn’t whether audience measurement and outcomes data compete with one another. They answer different questions. Audience figures tell marketers who and how many people were exposed to a game or ad; outcomes can help show what consumers did afterward. As NFL viewing spans more environments, marketers increasingly have to understand both before deciding whether an expensive piece of football inventory delivered what they paid for.

Which numbers should marketers care about?

Audience size remains fundamental to an NFL media buy, but it answers only one part of the question. EDO measures what happens after consumers see an ad, tracking increases in behaviors such as brand searches, website visits and app activity within minutes of an airing. Its methodology controls for impressions, ad duration and factors such as seasonality so marketers can compare performance across ads.
That becomes useful when seemingly small decisions can produce very different results. EDO’s findings show that category, sponsorship format and even position within a commercial break can affect engagement. Its advice to marketers is to test those variables against actual consumer behavior.

“Brands should use immediate, investment-grade outcomes data to test each ad and format, and then let the results, not the media plan’s default assumptions, decide the mix,” says Krim.

Audience measurement and outcomes measurement serve different purposes. A marketer still needs to know how many people an NFL buy reached and who those people were. Rayburn’s concern is that those figures require more scrutiny when the underlying definitions or methodologies differ between platforms. Outcomes provide another piece of the evaluation by showing whether exposure prompted consumer action.

That leaves marketers heading into this NFL season with more data than ever, but also more questions to ask of it. The league’s advertising power is difficult to ignore: EDO’s latest research shows NFL inventory outperforming primetime benchmarks across every category it measured.

For brands paying premium prices to be there, however, a big audience number or strong league-wide benchmark can’t answer everything. Evaluating the investment means knowing what was measured, how it was measured, which inventory produced the strongest response and how that performance compares with the right benchmark.

Source: thedrum.com