Major NFL advertiser’s TV ad impressions fall millions short—inside sports’ viewing discrepancies

Sports have winners and losers on and off the field, especially with the rise of legalized sports betting. But the biggest gamblers may be advertisers betting on conventional TV ratings, often not knowing if they won or lost. On broadcasts of three major sports leagues over the past year, there were significant variances between the average commercial minutes on which most advertisers trade TV and the actual audience for individual commercials, according to a study from iSpot.tv. For some advertisers, this can mean millions of dollars of free audience, which some are intentionally using arbitrage to get. But others get shortchanged by equal amounts. In the most extreme case, the second-leading NFL advertiser, an insurance brand, came up more than 100 million impressions short in delivery of spot-level audience compared to average viewing minutes last year, according to iSpot, which declined to identify the advertiser. Among the 15 most active advertisers across NFL, NBA and MLB broadcasts, six saw meaningful under-delivery of spot-level impressions compared to the average-minutes metric. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs “My bet going in was that if you took enough ads across enough networks and games over the course of the season, for the biggest advertisers, you wouldn’t see much difference,” said David Coletti, VP of sports insights and strategy for iSpot and a longtime ESPN research executive who led the study. “I found that the conventional wisdom I had in my head for years surprisingly wasn’t true. I was amazed at how much difference there is.” It all comes down to when during a game ads run. That NFL insurance advertiser that got shortchanged had 31% of its ads appear in commercial pods 22 through 27 late in games, compared to an average of 15% for the 15 advertisers studied. Audience patterns are somewhat predictable by league and circumstance, iSpot found. NFL audiences tend to ramp up in the first quarter and then remain stable before declining late in games when the outcomes are clear. NBA games start slow (at 59% of the average minute audience) but have a quick build and remain more stable late in games. MLB audiences take a longer time to build, then stay fairly stable. Generally, audiences for streaming broadcasts are more stable than for linear TV, Coletti said, because it’s harder for people to switch back and forth between games or programs. But there are wild cards that can create some dramatic differences between average audiences and when spots actually run. A case in point was a blowout early last football season when the Dallas Cowboys destroyed the New York Giants and roughly half the audience was gone after halftime. While football audiences generally decline over the course of games, close games may actually have their biggest audiences at the end. Generally, the most popular sports teams, such as the Los Angeles Lakers, Cowboys and New York Yankees, ramp up faster and hold audiences better than others. The study covered nationally broadcasted games for the NFL, NBA and MLB during the 2023-24 regular season, delivered via cable and virtual cable providers (such as YouTubeTV and Fubo). Agency Review Tracker Stay up to date with the latest account reviews Click here Growing importance of sports While the study didn’t look at the divergence for other types of programming, it’s likely much smaller for scripted, reality and news programming than sports, where interest waxes and wanes depending on how the games go. The potentially big divergence between average and individual spot minutes in sports is getting more important all the time as sports take an ever bigger share of TV dollars and sports rights fees soar amid growing competition from networks, streaming services and digital platforms. ISpot found a 12% increase in delivery of sports ad units in the past year, when sports accounted for 14% of linear TV commercial time for the full year, rising to 19% in the fourth quarter. The patterns suggest that different game parts should command different prices, but that’s generally not the way inventory is sold, according to industry executives. Networks that have access to iSpot, VideoAmp, Comsore or, more recently, Nielsen big data plus panel products, could trade on pod-level, spot-level or even second-level data in some cases. But they generally don’t, according to measurement industry executives. Nielsen late last year backed out of plans to trade only on individual rather than average commercial minutes for this year’s upfront, which is trading largely on Nielsen’s legacy C3 and C7 currencies based on panel data and average commercial minutes. Arbitrage opportunities That suggests considerable room for arbitrage, using informed guesses on what individual commercial audiences actually will be to get the largest audiences while paying only on the average audience. But agencies largely aren’t using available data in that way, said executives familiar with industry trading. Some marketers, however, are, said iSpot CEO Sean Muller. “We do have some more sophisticated clients,” he said. “A lot of advertisers have absolutely adopted this exact-ad measurement and have been using our system for arbitrage, not just in sports, but in other areas. I even know one client thatºs taken all this and has literally created a predictive model of the different types of sports and sports teams to decide where they might want to be buying to get higher audiences. So the smarter ones are already arbitraging and there's likely more arbitrage coming.” Why not trade on commercial minutes? Networks have resisted trading on individual minutes or pods, said Josh Chasin, former chief measurability officer of VideoAmp and now an independent consultant. “It upsets the whole apple cart of price and how sales forces get compensated,” Chasin said. “When the conversation moved to whether currency should move to what I call exact commercial seconds for this upfront, the consensus was that it was way too disruptive.” Eventually, the market will move to trading on individual commercial minutes or some more exact measure. Predicting exactly when that will happen is harder. It’s all in keeping with a decades-long history of media measurement moving to more granular data but sellers resisting the move, Chasin said. Howard Shimmel, head of strategy for media analytics firm Datafuelx, said his best prediction is that the next upfront, 2025-26, will move to individual commercial minutes or impression-based measures. But that was long the prediction for this year’s upfront, and it didn’t happen. Shimmel said big obstacles remain to widespread adoption of spot-level TV buying, including the need for agencies to upgrade their information technology systems to trade on more granular data and Mediaocean implementing long-expected changes to its industry-leading billing and payments infrastructure to accommodate minute- or impression-level buys.

Major NFL advertiser’s TV ad impressions fall millions short—inside sports’ viewing discrepancies

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