The cost of buying airtime in a regular-season NFL game has never been higher, but for marketers with the wherewithal to plunk down more than $1 million for 30 seconds of commercial inventory, no media investment is anywhere near as effective.
According to EDO’s “2024-25 NFL TV Outcomes Report,” a single ad that aired during last season’s slate of games across broadcast and cable delivered the same impact as 23 commercials in any non-NFL programming. Which is to say, a marketer looking to generate the same amount of engagement as a standalone spot in an NFL telecast would have to buy 23 half-minute units elsewhere to match the effectiveness of an in-game ad.
While much of the NFL’s performance metrics are a function of the league’s unparalleled reach—CBS’ Sunday afternoon national window, for example, averaged 24.3 million viewers last season, or more than seven times what the average episode of a non-sports primetime broadcast series scared up in 2024-25 (3.33 million)—football’s engagement is also superpowered by our collective consumption habits. As nearly 99% of all NFL games are watched live/in real-time, the commercial avoidance that plagues general-entertainment programming is largely a non-factor.
By way of example, suppose you’re looking to replicate the Fox NFL experience in primetime. On average, an advertiser looking to secure a single 30-second unit in the network’s big 4:20 p.m. ET window paid around $1.1 million per in-game spot during the spring/summer upfront bazaar. (Including the early Thanksgiving Day game in Detroit, Fox has 12 national NFL broadcasts lined up for the 2025-26 regular-season campaign.) Per media buyer estimates, the average spot in Season 36 of Fox’s Sunday night primetime anchor, The Simpsons, sold for around $48,000 a pop in the year-ago upfront, against an 11-episode fall run that averaged 1.73 million viewers per week.
As it happens, The Simpsons makes for a near-perfect monetary comparison with Fox’s “America’s Game of the Week” tent pole, as it would require 23 spots in the long-running animated show to stack up against the cost of a single unit in the big NFL window. That said, snatching up that much inventory during Fox’s Sunday 8 p.m. ET ad breaks won’t get you quite the same volume of impressions as that one national NFL spot. On a cumulative basis, an equivalent Simpsons buy last fall would have netted an advertiser approximately 20.8 million live-plus-same-day impressions—still a bit shy of the average reach of one spot in Fox’s big NFL window (23.9 million).
Of course, the return on your primetime investment depends on whether or not Fox’s cartoon juggernaut—now entering its 37th season, The Simpsons passed Gunsmoke as the longest-running American scripted series seven years ago—was the beneficiary of a big NFL lead-in. Per Nielsen, the six episodes that aired shortly after Fox’s national NFL coverage wrapped for the day averaged 2.4 million viewers, whereas the five installments that didn’t benefit from a football boost averaged 936,800 viewers.
By EDO’s reckoning, the only delivery system that’s more effective than an NFL game on linear TV is … an NFL game on a streaming platform. According to the analytics firm’s new study, ads that ran during NFL games that were carried exclusively by one of the streamers were 66% more effective for brands than spots that aired in shows across broadcast and cable networks.
Stands to reason. When high-impact programming is made available via a device that allows for instantaneous impulse buys and the more general sniffing-out of the offers showcased in a given commercial break, marketers have nothing but open field ahead of them. By way of example, Amazon’s Black Friday presentation of the Chiefs’ playoff-clinching 19-17 win over the Raiders averaged 13.5 million live-same-day viewers, and while those deliveries were about a third of what Fox scared up the previous afternoon with the big Giants-Cowboys window (38.8 million), the streamer/online retailer’s $750,000 in-game ads were 51% more effective than the spots that aired during the three Thanksgiving Day broadcasts.
And Prime Video wasn’t the only streamer to shake things up last fall. Netflix’s first foray into its Christmas partnership with the NFL was a game-changer for advertisers, as movie trailers and video game ads that ran during the Chiefs-Steelers/Ravens-Texans doubleheader were found to be 84% more effective than the same categories performed during NFL TV buys. Meanwhile, pharma ads that streamed during Netflix’s Yuletide two-fer were 70% more impactful.
Another platform that experienced a significant lift in ad effectiveness was Peacock, which saw its exclusive Sept. 6 Packers-Eagles showcase claim a 116% boost when compared to standard TV buys. That’s undoubtedly welcome news to YouTube, which will stream next week’s Chiefs-Chargers game from São Paulo for no charge. (With YouTube taking over the Brazil game, Peacock’s NFL exclusive has been shifted to the back end of the season, as the streamer will carry a standalone game, quite possibly Ravens-Packers, on Saturday, Dec. 27.)
Among the biggest in-game spenders last season were insurance brands, which collectively invested $447 million on regular-season NFL ads, and representatives from the automotive category ($444 million). Quick-serve and casual-dining restaurants pumped another $438 million of marketing spend into the NFL ecosystem, while retail accounted for $314 million in buys and financial services coughed up $217 million.
All told, some 550 brands bought time in NFL games last season, with overall spend coming in at approximately $5.2 billion. Among the brands that out-performed the field last fall were Aflac, GMC, Pepsi, SoFi, Target, Volkswagen and Walmart.
