The NFL is undergoing an audience revolution as it expands to new platforms, grows its presence internationally and embraces the recent influx of Swifties (the name for Taylor Swift fans) chasing their pop idol to stadiums. Many of these efforts are to future-proof its tight hold as one of TV’s top-performing properties and build its brand for every stage of life—including Gen Z and Gen Alpha. 

On Sunday, Disney will air an alternate broadcast of the Atlanta Falcons and Jacksonville Jaguars game in London on its streaming platforms—but instead of flesh-and-bone players, the athletes will be rendered in real-time as “Toy Story” figurines. It’s a similar strategy to rival Nickelodeon, which over the past two years has hosted its own simulcasts that surround the live-action players with geysers of neon-green slime and commentating from characters like SpongeBob SquarePants.

Sarah Bishop, VP of brand and consumer marketing for the NFL, said that 82% of the league’s audience become fans before the age of 18, “so the younger that we can recruit those people in the most relevant way possible, the more it sets us up for success in the long run.”

While the NFL has numerous programs for youth outreach, including flag football leagues and a partnership with video game maker Electronic Arts, Bishop said the addition of Disney and Nickelodeon’s alternate broadcasts not only allows the NFL “to reach a new audience that these partners have that maybe we don’t yet,” but also grants the league a more direct relationship with young viewers without relying on parents to introduce them to the sport.

Also read: Brands embrace the Swift-Kelce relationship

The league’s effort to attract younger fans comes as TV audiences in general have been shrinking—linear TV audiences have steadily declined in recent years and streaming viewers are fragmented across numerous platforms. While sports, particularly the NFL, are linear TV’s most consistent ratings pull, the NFL isn’t safe from the trend either. The 2022 regular season was down 3% in viewers compared to the year prior, per Front Office Sports, and even the recent boom from the Taylor Swift-attended game between the Chiefs and Bears, which many are attributing its 24.3 million viewers to the flood of Swift fans flocking to their TVs, was a decrease from the comparable game last year, which saw an audience of about 26.4 million, according to Front Office Sports.

Family viewing

This weekend, Disney will bring its first fully animated NFL game to its streamers Disney+ and ESPN+. The game, which will air live on Oct. 1 at 9:30 a.m. ET, will use motion capture technology to place players and commentators in the world of Pixar’s “Toy Story” in real time. Featuring appearances from the movie franchise’s characters including Woody and Buzz Lightyear, the “Toy Story Funday Football” will feature segments to teach kids about the sport, including sponsored breaks that show trivia and lessons about the rules of football rather than ads. 

But the goal for the NFL’s child-appealing games on Nick and Disney isn’t just about connecting with the networks’ young audiences, which Bishop characterized as ages six to 14. The games are able to reach new audiences in general, including those who are tapped into the nostalgia of franchises such as “Toy Story,” which debuted in 1995 and released its most recent sequel “Toy Story 4” in 2019, or “SpongeBob SquarePants,” which has been airing on Nick since 1999.

For its part, Disney conducted research to select the most relevant IP to set its NFL broadcast within, said Tim Reed, VP of programming and acquisitions at ESPN. “Toy Story” was selected for its multi-generational impact to create co-viewing between parents and kids. 

“The idea is we want to connect with fans the way they want to see their game, and some fans might be more traditionalists that are going to watch the traditional broadcasts,” added Deidra Maddock, VP of sports brand solutions at Disney. “Other fans may be co-viewing and watching with kids, or they just might be diehard ‘Toy Story’ fans.”

Nearly 50% of viewing on Disney+ is from adults without children, according to the company, which is able to broadcast the kids-centered game on Disney+ due to its expanded rights deal with the NFL, which included one international game for ESPN+. The game will be viewable in over 95 international markets and will be rewatchable for 30 days following the live broadcast. 

Another example of the NFL’s growing appeal to younger audiences is the social buzz NFL games have received from Taylor Swift’s rumored relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Swift’s attendance at the Chiefs-Bears game on Sunday helped boost TV viewership and has led to a 400% sales spike of Kelce’s jersey. But many of the league’s newfound viewers have little familiarity with the sport and have taken to the internet to express their confusion over how it is played. 

The alternate broadcasts, meanwhile, are built to teach “what a challenge flag is or how the timeouts work in a game,” said Maddock. “We’ve done so many studies over the years about how people learn to be fans when we’re relevant to them. They learned to be a fan of a specific team because their parents were a fan of that specific team, and now the way that people are consuming content differently, being able to reach them in all these different places is great.”

The NFL’s partnership with Disney for its “Toy Story” game mirrors a similar strategy it’s taken up with Nickelodeon. The Paramount-owned network has aired occasional kid-focused simulcasts since 2021, featuring animated neon green slime—a Nickelodeon staple—and characters such as SpongeBob SquarePants and his sidekick Patrick Star. The tactic has been used for two Wild Card playoff games already and one holiday special last Christmas. Nickelodeon will broadcast another game on Christmas this year in addition to the 2024 Super Bowl.

Related: A guide to advertising on the NFL on Nick

Nickelodeon had found a significant crossover between sports and young viewers, which served as the foundation for launching live simulcast games on Nick, said Ashley Kaplan, executive VP, Nickelodeon and Awesomeness unscripted and digital franchise studio at Paramount. But more importantly, Kaplan said Nick’s “KPI is to be in the national conversation, to be the water-cooler talk Monday morning” because they’re “sharing clips of our broadcast and talking about our Slime Cannon.”

“Our first Wild Card game [in 2021] broke the internet—traditional sports media was talking about the Nickelodeon game more than the traditional Wild Card game,” said Kaplan, who noted the most surprising result of launching NFL games on Nick was not only the positive response from kids but also the large “amount of adults who enjoy it, talk about it, share it and engage with it.”

Read more: How Paramount is selling its Super Bowl broadcasts

The first NFL game on Nick drew an audience of 2.1 million, while the second saw 1.3 million viewers and the third had 906,000. Comparatively, the kids network averaged 287,000 viewers in primetime last year, according to Nielsen.

Nick’s NFL partnership was also built to maximize the audience for its holiday game, “NFL Nickmas,” which aired for the first time in 2022 and is returning on Christmas Day 2023. The “Nickmas” game “strategically is placed on a family-centric holiday to make sure that we have the opportunity for the whole family to watch together” and maximize co-viewing, said the NFL’s Bishop.

Platform evolution

“Giving us ways to reach new audiences is fantastic, but I didn’t think younger audiences were watching television,” one media agency executive told Ad Age when asked about the kid-focused games. A second media agency executive said, “My kids don’t know what Nickelodeon is. They know what YouTube is and Netflix and Disney+, but if I tell them about the networks that Disney owns, they don’t know about it.”

The NFL has been migrating slowly onto streaming platforms, granting its traditional broadcast partners the ability to stream some games on their own streamers, but also licensing “Thursday Night Football” to Amazon and “Sunday Ticket” to Google’s YouTube.

For kids, streaming is a critical method of engagement. Disney first experimented with its motion-capture animated sports earlier this year in an animated “Big City Greens”-themed NHL game. The “Big City Greens Classic” match between the New York Rangers and Washington Capitals on March 14 similarly featured animated players in real time with themed commentators and guests. The game aired on ESPN, Disney Channel and Disney XD, and pulled an audience of 765,000 across all three, according to ESPN, the third largest audience for the 2022-2023 NHL season.

“Toy Story Funday Football” takes learnings from the NHL broadcast and finesses the format. The NFL alternate stream will incorporate new elements made possible by streaming, such as the sponsored trivia and audience interactions, which Disney’s Reed said will carry the same voice and storytelling developed during the game into the breaks.

As for the brands advertising in “Toy Story Funday Football,” Disney’s Maddock said it was necessary to take a different approach from a typical NFL game, which she said might incorporate “50, 60, 80 advertisers,” and instead work with an advertiser that could incorporate its messaging into the stream’s tech and was looking to find a new NFL audience.

While one might expect a brand typical of kids' channels to advertise against “Toy Story” content, such as a toy or frozen lunch brand, the Disney alternate broadcast will feature one sponsor in the insurance category. Maddock declined to name the specific brand, but said “it is somebody who has partnered with us significantly in the NFL.”

“We actually went to market specifically not approaching kid-targeted brands,” said Maddock. “It’s more about brands that want to be affiliated with NFL content in a way that is inclusive of a family-friendly environment.”

Maddock said “Toy Story Funday Football” was initially planned with a max capacity of four brand partners, but that only the insurance advertiser will be participating because “it was a very tight turn frankly… because of how much technology goes into producing these ad breaks—it’s not like we can just turn around and add somebody tomorrow if we wanted to do another one.”

A marketing ecosystem

The second media agency executive said advertisers and media brands are often too focused on immediate results, but that they “have to build their brand for the future, and that’s one of the biggest things that’s not happening with this generation … sports are always going to be in our life, but if [sports networks] don’t start talking to the kids and getting them in now, then what’s the NFL going to be on TV in 10 years? Because the kids don’t watch TV.”

To be sure, maintaining the NFL’s audience also ensures the longevity of its distribution rights, and the ever-growing prices that it’s able to charge for them. The league’s deal with Google for YouTube streaming rights was valued between $2 billion and $2.5 billion per year for seven years, according to the company. Amazon paid an estimated $1 billion per year for 11 seasons when it acquired exclusive rights to “Thursday Night Football” in 2021.

Part of the NFL’s strategy around its kid-centered alternate broadcasts with Nick and Disney is to surround both with content on platforms that relate to young audiences. The NFL’s Bishop said that each broadcast will feature simultaneous content dropping on social media, as well as additional activations, such as an in-person pop-up this Sunday at Disneyland in California. 

Bishop also pointed to the NFL’s partnership with video game company Electronic Arts and its recent partnership with YouTube to incorporate the platform’s creator network into its marketing and content for “Sunday Ticket.”

For Nickelodeon, retaining the audience from its simulcasts without the ability to air an entire season of slime-ified alternate broadcasts meant launching the series “NFL Slimetime,” which airs throughout the NFL season and is currently in its third season. The show features highlights from games, complete with the requisite Nick-themed surprises and animations, and is a way for fans of the special live games to return to the network regularly. Nick also creates viral moments around the show; each week, “Slimetime” crowns an “NVP” from the week’s highlights, who gets a trophy and slimed.

“It’s a highlight of my week when I see a player on social get really excited about the ‘NVP’ trophy and he gets slimed by his teammates,” said Paramount’s Kaplan. “There we’re engaging with an audience that maybe isn’t watching linear.” (Nick’s NFL alternate broadcasts are only available on its linear network.)

Kaplan also teased potential upcoming work between Nick and the NFL in Roblox and other platforms that attract young audiences.

Although Disney and Nick’s alternate broadcasts aren’t full-season options for viewers, the NFL continues to fill out its growing slate of alternate broadcasts with options that appeal to various ages, such as Amazon’s alternate “TNF” stream, “TNF in the Shop” hosted by LeBron James, according to the NFL’s Bishop. For Bishop, the Nick and Disney broadcasts offer a new way for the marketer to explore connecting with young viewers, and welcoming the next generation of fans and athletes.