NFL Advertising Hits Record Highs: What’s Driving Nearly $6 Billion in Revenue?

The NFL continues to dominate live sports advertising.

In this episode, Kelly and Sean break down Guideline’s latest NFL Advertising Report, examining the trends, categories, teams, and schedule changes shaping one of the most valuable advertising properties in the world.

The NFL generated nearly $6 billion in advertising revenue last season, marking another record year of growth. Kelly and Sean discuss what is fueling that growth, how playoff matchups impact revenue, why certain teams consistently attract advertiser dollars, and what the league's newest scheduling changes could mean for advertisers in the upcoming season.

The conversation also explores:

• Why NFL advertising continues to outperform expectations
• How playoff games drive major revenue increases
• The impact of streaming, Netflix, and special-event games
• Why the Dallas Cowboys remain an advertising powerhouse
• How celebrity culture influences sports viewership
• The surprising category spending trends shaping the NFL
• Why financial services became the NFL’s biggest advertiser category
• What international expansion means for league revenue
• New schedule changes and their advertising implications
• Predictions for the upcoming NFL season

Whether you're an advertiser, marketer, media planner, sports executive, or simply interested in the business behind professional sports, this episode provides a data-backed look at how the NFL continues to drive massive audience attention and advertising investment.

Key Topics Covered

• NFL advertising revenue
• NFL media economics
• Sports advertising trends
• NFL playoffs advertising
• Super Bowl advertising
• Financial services advertising
• Auto advertising trends
• Sports media strategy
• NFL international expansion
• Streaming and NFL viewership
• Sports sponsorship trends
• Live sports advertising
• NFL schedule changes
• Sports media planning

If you’d like access to the benchmark report or want to suggest a topic for the next part of the programmatic series, reach out to press@guideline.ai.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow or subscribe so you don’t miss future conversations on advertising, media strategy, and cultural marketing moments.

And if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, a quick rating or review helps more people discover the show.

Transcript

0:04

You're listening to Media Monitor, where we break down what's happening in the media and the advertising industry and tell you what it actually means. Hey, Sean. Hey Kelly. How's the are you well? You know, we're just in a holding pattern over here waiting to see who the Knicks are gonna play next week. I'm sure you're also eagerly awaiting that. Uh yes, with bated breath. Sean, this is a really big deal. The Knicks, they they need a title, okay? And if you're not in the game here, I can't take full credit for knowing about this, but I can tell you that my husband has me really in it with them. I'm super excited. I also love watching to see who's sitting court side, which little Chalamet and Kylie, I mean that's all the usual suspects. It's it's good television. I will be honest with you. So, you know how we talk about Venn diagram. This is so far outside of out of my circle, but hilariously, I have come across on the subreddit the the Fau Ma one, a few of the celebs, you know, seating type things. Uh despite actually haven't watched a single Knicks game since I went once with a high school friend because I live in the tri-state. So like you got to, right? At some point. That's like just a rite of passage. If you're gonna live somewhere in in and around New York, you gotta go to Madison Square Garden at least once. So I checked that box and I've never been back since. Well, the Brunson boys I think are are doing, they're looking good. And um, yes, if if you we could talk more about seating and who was in the second row and the first row, but I digress. We got we got a sports-focused episode today, Sean. We do, which is always for me on thin ice, providing insights. Because half the time I'm looking at the data. I know the data, I I understand it, but sometimes I need a little help with the context because the sports thing is is maybe a little bit past my wheelhouse on the day-to-day. Well, the good news is you're a data guy, you you get into it, and we're actually. Which by the way, ironically, because like sports, everyone's a data guy in sports, right? Like people go crazy for the stats and like talk about this and do statistical models on who's gonna win. You would think that like that would be an area of of interest for me. And I tried to get into it once. I was like, you know what, let me let me take a pass at this. Uh, and it lasted for like two weeks. And I was like, You watched Moneyball. Yeah, I was like, I watched Moneyball. I read Nate Silver. I was like, man, this is cool. And then I was like two weeks in, I was like, ah, this is too much effort. And like it requires too much context. And it's like you're almost following a level of like soap opera drama on top of following the stats to follow who's hurt, who's not, who's in. Is this guy getting traded? It was like just it's I was like, you know what? This is a side job just to keep up with what's going on. I'm out. It's true. It's true. I mean, and but some for some, that's the beauty of it. They love understanding the IL and and all that. But I think you're selling yourself short. You do a tremendous job evaluating data and in particular, um, our NFL report. So one of the things that I think you know, you very smartly decided to do this year was to delay the release a little bit in order to add more information. Because you said, hey, why don't we wait until they release the 26-27 schedule for the season so that we can have a preview into what it might look like and make some predictions, which I think was a great ad. And for those listening who don't know, we do sell reports to folks and um, you know, reach out, we'll we'll give you the spiel. But today we're gonna give some teasers because we are about to release our NFL report and we've got some really interesting stats where we dive into what did the past season looked like, what were some of the themes, and then we'll do a little bit of a look forward. So, Sean, why don't you walk us through some of the highlights from the previous season and some some little teasers for folks? Yeah, for sure. So I think kind of collectively, just to reiterate for folks, I know for most of you tuning in week after week, you know this. We are gonna report on specifically our data. We're not projecting, we're not kind of creating models. So, what our data is, is it's the the agencies, big hold codes, mid-size independents, working directly with them to get their billing data. So the the line of sight we have we see is these big brands, big agencies, which obviously are the folks that typically will spend in the NFL. But it's also what we have line of sight into is the things like paid media. So all of the things you hear around total revenue for the NFL in a given year, that's going to include the paid media component, which we're gonna report on on, but also things like sponsorships or like ticket revenue is sometimes included in that. So I don't want to conflate for folks that are listening at home to be like, wait, these numbers don't jive with what I've seen, right? This is gonna be strictly what are you paying for those spots and dots you see, that 30 second spot kind of at your, you know, right after the kickoff, in between, you know, uh, you know, halftime, quarters, whatever, any of that ad unit, that's that's what we're talking about today. So I wanted to kind of benchmark. But that being said, yet another for like the third year in a row post-COVID, a record high for the NFL in terms of of you know overall revenue, coming in just short of six billion for us. Um, and that was seven percent growth year over year, just in terms of where things are at. And and kind of for broader context, this is off of like a sustained five-year compound annual growth kind of average of essentially like seven percent. So it's just seven percent on top of seven percent on top of seven percent. And what's interesting is it's not purely pricing, right? Because that's usually the first place that people go to of like, oh, you you went up, it must be pricing. It's not, right? Like pricing. Wait, so hold on, help me understand that because the way I'm thinking about it, there's a defined number of spots where ads can run. So how are we making more money if not by charging more? Yeah. So there's kind of a couple of things that we've seen in the season. One, kind of uh, you know, changing around some of the game schedules, you know, the Black Friday game post kind of Thanksgiving. That's now what, two years in? That's been driving a little incremental revenue. The whole Christmas game on Netflix also added a bump in terms of additional revenue. That tends to be places. The other kind of huge, usually kind of the big swing for us in terms of what we see in the data is the regular season's pretty consistent, kind of year over year in terms of dollars, but the playoffs are where we tend to see some of like the the smooshiness in our data. Because if you have two teams that are rivals and they're they're kind of going out for conference championships, maybe it's head to head to see who is ultimately going to go to the Super Bowl, viewership spikes. And you know, then you start to see a lot of ad units. As things get streamed, a lot of it is then tied to you know impressions on streaming. So all of those things kind of create this variable up or down that's not just pure pricing. So even for the same ad unit, when you start getting into these games where like they're really popular and a lot of people are tuning in, it it drives overall revenue. When you get kind of these like duds, or maybe it's a blowout, like that's that's bad for revenue. It's also bad for viewership, right? Like nobody wants to see a game where like you just run up the scoreboard and all of a sudden it's like seven touchdowns in four minutes, and you're like, Well, there's no reason to watch this. This is sad. So and I know you said you didn't want to get into the soap opera of it all, but there may have been an engagement last year that you might have heard about. I might have. I might have. Right? Yeah. I I mean, you gotta say, like Taylor's, she's she's driving some eyeballs, right? Like if if she's gonna be at the game, people want to know, people want to run their ads because people more people are watching, because they want to see what's going on. So, yes, this the that drama, and it's not drama, but that element of it, that celebrity of it, I think is a growing component of this. For sure. But yeah, like so it's it's all those things uh kind of mixed together. So what's interesting is like basically from a 25-26 perspective, all you know, some of that growth really came from the playoffs. It wasn't kind of the sole growth, the regular season also saw some growth. Uh, but you know, the the playoffs alone kind of grew, let's call it around like $250 million in ad revenue. Um, and some of that was tied to the drama. The regular season also did well, but the regular season historically is is over four billion bucks a year. So, like, you know, moving 200 million over 4 billion is just a smaller percentage than you know, 250 million off of a billion. So it was a you know a material gain for the playoffs. And again, part of that was schedule changes, uh, part of that was you know matchups, uh, just overall in terms of of driving some interest and eyeballs. Got it. So tell is there I guess, well, I mean my next question is gonna be how did the Super Bowl perform? You know, moderately uh up over the prior year. Um pricing was was up pretty healthy, but overall the Super Bowl in terms of overall revenue, I think was up like two, three percent in our data. A lot of that kind of again sits outside, really tied to sponsorships. Um and so that's that's kind of the the bigger question going forward is like how much could you really move on price on some of these things, right? There there has to be a ceiling at some point. Yeah, I saw an article. Um I think uh I don't want to misattribute it. It may have been in variety, but if it wasn't, I apologize to whoever did write this article out there. But that Disney apparently is is already out this upfront asking for six million a unit for the Super Bowl, which would be yeah, which would be almost like a two two hundred thousand dollar jump from this year where it was like hovering in that like five, five point eight. But there were a few units this year that reportedly sold uh for over eight million dollars on Peacock. So, you know, who knows, right? Maybe this is their their going price, six million in the upfront. But as it gets closer, maybe they're selling on Hulu a 10 million, you know, uh ad unit kind of thing, which again, crazy, but that's the world we live in. Yeah, so I mean it sounds it this all makes sense, right? It's like who's playing? How what's the level of competition in those games? Is there kind of an external factor? Um some buzz. How are the how are the teams doing? Is are you know, are there I'm assuming tea different teams drive different amounts of revenue and that probably changes over time. What are we seeing there? Yeah, so uh a few things. Uh kind of a consistent performer every single year is the Dallas Cowboys. You know, so I think uh based on where our geography stats are, there's probably about, let's call it, 30% of our audiences that's really gonna hate that, and maybe about 10% is gonna be super into that. Sean, I'm guessing you didn't watch Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, America Sweethearts. You are guessing correct. Although I did actually see half an episode once because my wife was watching it and I was like in between activities. So I guess technically maybe watched a little. I I know the premise, roughly speaking. Well, I have to say, when I was reviewing your report and saw the Cowboys at the top of that chart in 2024, I had to ask myself, when did that show come out? And interestingly enough, it was filmed during that season, and I think people knew it was happening. And, you know, I I gotta give to the girls. I think that they I think they had some influence over this. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't think the cheerleaders get enough credit. We we kind of chatted about this, but like it's wild, you know, there is a huge athletic component to what they do. They're spending time, effort, money making sure that they're in kind of top physical shape to kind of uh be out there cheering, doing all of these things, and they are certainly not getting athlete level pay. I think because of the show, they get now paid more, but that's like the very best of the squad, is who gets paid more. So it's not even like your average, but I think during the show, wasn't it something like 500 bucks a game or something? Something wild where you're like they all have multiple other jobs, and it's not just physical shape, it's aesthetic shape. 100% they have to look perfect. It's it's so wild. I could do a whole talk on that. But anyway, when I saw the Cowboys, I had to say, yeah, Cowboys top of the sheet. Although, yeah, uh 25, 26, uh Eagles or Eagles, depending on where you are in the country. Uh they they topped the charts, uh, have had a good run just in terms of uh you know a couple successful years. Chiefs were up there again, you know, pretty strong the last couple of years in terms of like the top 10. Something that kind of uh was a bit a bit of a surprise to me was uh the Patriots, given kind of they've they've been fan favorites for a while, kind of been in and out of the Super Bowl. Um, you know, they've kind of progressively kind of just like hovered in the same spot. I would have thought they would have kind of gone up or down in our chart, but they've kind of hovered. And I guess maybe like a uh special mention is is the poor Jets. Uh basically every single year in our charts, you could kind of track identical to their record exactly where they fall on the revenue chart for us. And it's just been kind of consistently every single year, as those losses pile up, they kind of fall further and further down the chart. Uh, which again, kind of being a Jersey guy, you kind of have to pick giants or jets. And growing up, it was funny because it was basically like the two sides of my family, like my my mom's side, my dad's side, hard split on giants or jets. So like I was always kind of grown up right down the middle and you know, split in terms of of who I should be cheering for uh between the two. So I did way back in the day have a Ronnie Lott jersey. That was like my last time I was into football, was way back in the day. Oh my god. And I'm pretty sure like four people had a Ronnie Lott jersey. Like no one cared about Ronnie Lot. Everyone you could have picked, Ronnie Lott did not make the top of anyone's list. Oh my god. Well, I I for one found this chart very interesting. Yeah. So more more on that, I'm sure. But um let's talk categories. So who's buying these ads? Yeah. So something that was like a legitimate surprise for me was finance. Finance. Finance. Uh, and I had to think about it and I was like, wait a second. So I like I went back and I was like, oh, you know what? There's a Capital One commercial, like every single game I've ever seen in the past like two years. And I was like, well, I guess that is fine. And so I was like looking back and it's like it's a lot of banking, it's a lot of credit cards, um, and they're pushing pretty heavy into the space. Um, not that they were a small investment before, but they were top three back in like 27, 20, you know, 18 season. They were the number one by far this year in the 25, 26, like a real big investment. And then a call back to our you know, prior episode, auto, you know, was the number two, right? You you again synonymous of like when you think about football on a Sunday, you think, okay, what you know, car commercial I'm gonna see. They went from the second largest category in sports, or I should say the NFL. They were fourth in the the last season. My guess is you're gonna see that probably drop another another position by, I'm guessing, you know, the end of the 26, 27 season. Yeah, that seems like the right trajectory there. And um, so it sounds like you know, financial services growing, autos declining, others kind of kind of sitting where they sit. Yeah. No, no major changes otherwise. Yeah. The other one was like entertainment. It's like you you follow them on our chart and it's like a squiggly line. You know, from 17, 18, they're number four, and then by 25, 26, they're like number two. But the ride they take to get there is like literally up, down, second, number one category, number 10th category. They're all over the place. Um, and a lot of that is um actually film related, um, is what's driving a lot of that behavior. In years where they're pushing a lot of trailers, where they're trying to get out um, you know, butts and seats ahead of, you know, uh any major releases, that tends to be where they spike. So that's a category that's pretty cyclical and tied to whatever the major release schedule is for the studios of like in years where there's a lot they want to push, bam, trailer. Um, in years where maybe their movie slate's a little light in the fall/slash winter, you're not gonna see a lot from spending from them. Yeah, that that makes total sense. So all right. Well, that I feel like that's a pretty solid recap of the pre the past season. Let's look forward. Yeah. Uh, we just the schedule just came out, some changes announced. What do you think is kind of the the biggest needle mover of changes that were announced? Yeah, it's a good question. So I would I would frame this as two things. To one, highlight what you said at the beginning. This is our first shot at trying something like this. You know, historically, we've been producing this report for the last couple of years, but we've always stuck to just recapping what has happened. This is our first year where we're like, well, hold on. We are already a month out already from a reporting perspective. Our data comes out about a month after what happens, right? So in February, when the Super Bowl happens, you don't get to see a lot of that rich detail until March. So we're already like kind of out of the swing of the season for media rights holders, right? There isn't these negotiations that need to happen. You don't need that data right away. Um, and so there's there's not a really kind of like hard press of like why we need to be out in the market immediately following our data. So yeah, for this year we sat like, well, let's sit on it. Let's try to get it to be more topical around a time when things are maybe buzzing about the NFL, which is why a couple of weeks ago they came out with their big schedule changes. And we're like, well, this could actually be something cool that we want to talk about in terms of overall revenue impact. And I think there was a couple of big, big callouts for this year. Number one is uh they've they've added two more international games. I think you know, the NFL is like 70% of the US's overall live sports ad revenue. But when you look at the international component, the NBA, which is a much smaller league from a revenue perspective, is so much more international. So it's like the ironically one of the few places where like the NFL is playing catch-up. Everywhere else, right, the NFL is is objectively the leader in a lot of stuff that we look at. But like the one thing that we look at is like where there is a pretty big mismatch is like the NBA is a massive international um you know component team focus, etc. So they always have these like international games, they have a large viewership. So I think that's part of the push. Um they've added an additional two games. It could also be that we made it really confusing by calling it football, and there was a lot of things. Yeah, don't get me started on that, by the way. The whole football soccer thing of like why Americans get beef. Soccer is actually a British term that came around in the 1900s. We adopted it, and then the Brits left us in the dust, and we're like, we're back to football guys. And you're like, well, that's that's not cool. So yeah. Oh, it's no one nerve with you, Sean. I really bring the Brits on this one. It's not our fault we call it soccer. Yeah. But so edition of international games. Edition of international. Um they've opted, you know, they tried it for a few years to add in the Monday night doubleheaders, thinking, could we slam in another game? But this year they said, ha, you know what? We've kind of we've ran its course. We thought this would be good for the fans. It turns out that like people don't like to split their attention. A lot of the Monday night games don't start until pretty late. So a lot of people are like pushing bedtime and like, ah, it's not worth watching. I'm split attention, all these things. So they've moved away from from, and there weren't many games, but they've moved away from any doubleheader on a Monday night. Um, and they've also now added a Thanksgiving Eve game, which is interesting, right? Because for like 40 years, it was just Thanksgiving. Then I think what, three seasons ago, they added in the Black Friday game because of Amazon's Thursday night deal. They, you know, they basically lost out on a week. And so they, hey, the Amazon was basically like, hey, could we get something around this time? We don't have Thanksgiving games, so like the Black Friday game was born. And now they're like, okay, cool, let's add in a Thanksgiving Eve game. I mean, don't you feel like, how did it take them this long to think of this? Nobody is working the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. What are people doing? They're going home, they're sitting around with family, they're looking for something to do so they don't have to talk to their family, or they're at a bar with friends, watching a television screen, probably. Like that to me, and you know, I can't take full credit for this. I was kind of like chatting about it with my husband. He was like, This is the most obvious move of all time. Yeah. It's interesting, right? I've seen split feelings on it. I've seen some people of like, this is just too much football at this point. Other people are like, exactly your point, of like everyone's already not doing something and are already sitting around like having a few drinks. Now, the one thing I would throw out too is like there is a good chunk of folks out there that are like uh super into homecoming, and that's often on a Wednesday night. So for like parts of the country, there are people that are out and about doing homecoming high school games and watching high school football, which is like the big you know Wednesday night. That'd be one caveat. All right. I'll give you that. We'll see. We'll see, you know? I'm not one of those. I'm I'm neither of those. My my Wednesday night, I am basting my turkey, preparing it, uh, cooking it ahead because like we've got only one oven, so we have to like prepare different stuff. Uh baking pies and uh making a cheesecake. So I'm I'm in the kitchen pretty much all of Wednesday. Is that a staple of your Thanksgiving meal? The cheesecake? Yeah. Yeah, it's a big deal. It's uh it goes back three generations. We uh we thought the recipe was lost to us and we are cleaning out my some of my grandmother's things. And we found like an old tin box that had a handwritten note from my aunt whose whose cheesecake it is. So we we recovered it. It's in the family still. I have the recipe. And it's like a it's a big deal. It's like every year. That's just our thing. New York style for anyone that's like into cheesecakes. It's a real dense, kind of classic, a little, a little sour, very sweet kind of vibe. So shout out to cheesecakes everywhere. I love it. It's uh I'm always looking for a a solid cake on Thanksgiving because my birthday is in that week. It's happened four times. We could we could take this offline, but I don't think we've had this conversation. My daughter's birthday is also very close to Thanksgiving. And in fact, based on some rotations, sometimes has been on Thanksgiving. Yeah, November 28th. Uh oh, just slightly off. Okay. Well we'll we'll chit we'll chat more about it and maybe we'll have a cheesecake birthday. Birthday celebration, yeah. Good to know. Okay, before we get too far off track here, so going back to the schedule changes and announcements. Sounds like the the uh removal of the Monday night kind of like doubleheader is an area that you think might kind of change things. Yeah, right. Like I think I think this is like a little hard to kind of like talk through the cutting out of games might actually help them grow revenue. Because in our data, we saw that like in a singular game, when it's just the game on itself, they're making like 1.5x the revenue of like when the doubleheaders are together on like a per game basis. And so actually spreading out the the schedule a bit will allow those games that they've moved off to make money and not fight for advertising dollars or attention, and then really allow Monday night to shine in terms of driving overall revenue there and kind of boosting overall. Like if there's a singular game on, you know, at least in our data, a singular game on a Monday night makes a little less than 40 million bucks a game, ad revenue-wise, versus like if it's a double header, it's actually a little less than 30 grand. So you obviously add those things together and they seem like it's more, but actually separating them and moving them out, you're essentially like getting 40 mil plus 40 mil and you're getting to the 80 rather than like a 60 million on the on the on the when you're doing the doubleheader, if that makes sense. And I threw a lot of. No, no, I I I'm following. I can't remember that. Did the games when they had the doubleheaders, did they slightly overlap? Uh I mean, only if there were like, you know, overtime or things like that. I think most of the doubleheaders for this season were intentionally set up so that you could tune into both. You know, kickoff was pretty late. Whatever the second game was, usually kickoff was was pretty late at night uh to kind of make sure that like both both coasts could make it. So generally speaking, they did try to keep separation. So you could, in theory, watch both, but a lot of folks ultimately didn't. So like ratings also did okay uh on doubleheaders, but did much better on you know singular games. And there's also like the time of of when you're watching it, right? Like you were saying earlier, like I don't want to stay up. I mean, as a West Coast watcher for the majority, I lived on in New York for five years. I couldn't stay up for those games. Are you kidding me? It's rough. I gotta go to bed. I gotta go to bed. It's even worse on the East Coast, yeah, exactly. The West Coast at least. Yeah, exactly. The West Coast is amazing. You're like you're done by yeah, Super Bowl is great for the West Coast. Oh, it's beautiful. It's like three o'clock. Yeah, you're wrapping up. And it's even great, like the 9 a.m. games, like yeah, you know, like you can just it's I could go on and on. But uh all right. Well, we've seen our preview, we've heard our recap. If you're interested in learning more, reach out to us because we are happy to share more data with you. Anything else, Sean? Uh no, no, I think that was uh a good coverage of it. Uh, you know, we we do these reports for a couple of things. So we're in progress on the NBA. Uh, we both kind of have these monthly reporting as the leagues kind of uh play out their seasons. So we always update this like monthly review. And then we also have at the end of every season, you know, the NBA has one, MLB, and we've got a few other cooking in the mix. So we're always trying to figure out what's going on with live sports, given how important it is to the overall ad ecosystem, particularly in the US. I love it. So more uh kind of sports package reports to come. We'll probably talk a little bit about those. And um, in case I don't get a chance to say this again, go. Sure. Yeah. Go down till next time. All right. Talk to you later, John. Bye. Bye. That's Media Monitor. Follow us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts every Wednesday for a new episode. And as always, thanks for listening.