If Americans are often deeply weird about their college football, it’s because the entire gameday experience is a delivery system for a sort of communal ecstasy. Cram 100,000 enthusiasts into a poured-concrete horseshoe, hit them up with a century-old fight song and a few belts of something embossed with a label that shoos away pregnant ladies and operators of heavy machinery, and you’ve got all the makings of an afternoon of Hellenic-style out-of-body rapture.
Unless your team sucks, in which case: Welp.
For the networks carrying the fall roster of can’t-miss college football matchups, Saturdays are about to get positively Dionysian. The implementation of Nielsen’s new Big Data + Panel currency already promises to help juice the TV ratings, and a recent tweak to the company’s out-of-home measurement system is expected to scare up even bigger crowds in hitherto underserved markets from South Bend to Tallahassee.
In February of this year, Nielsen expanded its OOH coverage from 66% of all markets to a full 100%, an upgrade that allows the ratings service to measure audiences in bars, restaurants, gyms and pretty much anywhere else fans gather to watch sports. Private residences are also included in the OOH scheme, which goes a long way toward explaining why deliveries for the NFL’s Thanksgiving Day broadcasts have gone through the roof in recent years. (When the Cowboys thrashed the Commanders 45-10 in Fox’s 2023 Turkey Bowl window, it transpired that 41% of the audience had watched the game from beyond the bounds of their own households. In keeping with all the coats piled up on the bed in the guest room, visitors to other people’s residences accounted for the bulk of these bonus impressions.)
While the Nielsen upgrade kicked in well after the end of the 2024-25 college football season, the deliveries for this year’s campaign will fully reflect the revised method of counting the house. And as much as some of the most football-crazed markets were already monitored under the original OOH configuration—Ann Arbor’s on-campus crowd was already counted as part of the No. 14 Detroit DMA, and Athens’ Bulldogs backers are lumped in with the sprawling No. 7 Atlanta market—the addition of previously overlooked college towns is expected to provide a further boost to the Saturday ratings.
Among the top 25 programs that will see their TV stats rise this fall include Ole Miss, Wisconsin, Notre Dame, Penn State, Florida State, LSU, Oregon, Auburn and Tennessee. Located within the limits of the Memphis DMA, the Rebels represent one of bigger areas that hadn’t been covered under the original OOH plan, as their home market serves 666,300 TV homes. In bringing Madison online, Nielsen will report results from the Badgers’ local base of 443,200 TV homes, while the Irish (331,800) and Nittany Lions’ faithful (285,520) will also make a mark.
Because OOH consumption varies by market, it’s anyone’s guess as to how much of an overall lift the networks can expect, but the advance data collected last fall suggests that certain schools could see their ratings in national windows improve by as much as 7%. Bear in mind that most of the biggest TV draws in 2024-25, including Georgia, Texas, Michigan, Ohio State and Alabama, were already measured under the old OOH system; that said, the enhanced data-gathering efforts in some of the once-excluded SEC, Big Ten and Big 12 markets could really move the needle for the networks.
As a bonus, Nielsen is currently in the midst of bringing onboard around 8,600 new OOH panelists before the year is out.
Pricing for some college football windows rose higher than others, but the overall lift on a rate-of-change basis looks to be about +5% versus the year-ago period. Soft drinks, insurance and fast food were among the strongest categories in the spring/summer upfront bazaar, and uncertainties related to tariffs and other macroeconomic factors seemed to have little, if any, impact on automotive investment.
While the networks and their advertising partners would seem to have plenty of things to look forward to this fall, it’s worth noting that it took a hell of a lot of wrangling to get the OOH initiative off the ground in the first place. Ad sales execs had been trying to get agencies to bite on OOH viewing for decades, but their overtures always fell on deaf ears. As far back as the 1980s, ABC execs charged with selling Monday Night Football failed to convince a single client to cough up extra cash for the estimated OOH audiences generated by the NFL’s primetime showcase.
But perhaps no property offered more evidence of OOH bleed than college football. Before Nielsen integrated OOH measurement with its national TV ratings panel in 2020, a network ad sales exec on any given fall Saturday could stroll past thousands of squandered impressions as they spilled out of the bars and tap rooms of the Upper East Side. To glance into a few of the places on the avenues that catered to the SEC crowd was to apprehend waste in all its sickly semantic shadings; every Tennessee alum yowling along to “Rocky Top” at Brother Jimmy’s Bait Shack represented an uncredited pair of eyeballs, and the popped-collar set cheering on the Gators at the place with the 64-oz. fishbowls were merely rowdy phantoms.
Only the NFL puts up bigger numbers than college football, but the deliveries for the scholastic version had long been hampered by what amounted to a sort of collective oversight. In luring millions of fans outside their homes, the communal rites of gameday effectively erased untold numbers of valuable impressions every week, and while ad rates were inflated to reflect the systemic undercounts, sellers in the pre-OOH intuited that the ad-hoc adjustments didn’t quite square their accounts. Which is to say, the networks were being hosed.
Nine years ago, ESPN set about the task of dragging TV measurement out of its benighted state when it inked the industry’s very first OOH guarantees with the Publicis Groupe agency, Spark. And while it would take some time for other media shops to capitulate—citing the extant CPM inflation and some inconsistencies in the tracking and validation of OOH impressions, buyers were opposed to transacting against these alternative deliveries—Nielsen’s formal implementation put the debate to rest.
As it happens, the very first batch of OOH data that ESPN and Spark pored over in 2016 validated the long-held suspicion that scores of fans were being excluded from the official audience totals. According to Nielsen, college football that September saw the biggest OOH lift in the key sales demos among all sports, as deliveries for adults 18-49 and 25-54 were up 9% compared to ESPN’s linear TV ratings. When impressions that had been served up via the old WatchESPN app were factored in, the total audience for ESPN’s college football slate grew 10%.
Nielsen’s ongoing refinements arrive as the industry tries to straddle the divergent worlds of trad TV and streaming. (Picture someone with a foot planted in adjacent canoes that are drifting apart from each other and you’re halfway there.) Over the course of the 2024-25 broadcast season, overall TV usage fell 10% versus the year-ago period, while the legacy cable bundle closed out the nine-month stretch with fewer than 45 million paying customers.
Even when the virtual MVPDs are tossed into the mix, pay-TV penetration is down to just 52% of all U.S. TV homes, down from a peak of 91%. If nothing else, securing credit for all the impressions that had gone uncounted in the pre-OOH era allows the networks to more deftly maneuver their way through a market that is growing increasingly more unstable with every passing quarter—making those twin canoes just a bit easier to navigate.
