The National Football League has never had trouble selling advertising time, and a new analysis suggests the league's commercial inventory continues to justify its premium pricing — even as the question of exactly who is watching, and how to count them, grows more complicated with each passing season.
EDO, a company that measures how television advertising affects consumer behavior, found that the average regular-season NFL commercial during the 2025-26 season generated the same impact as 73 typical primetime advertisements, a figure that rose 15 percent from the previous year. The advantage grew more pronounced as the stakes increased: the average playoff spot delivered the equivalent of 172 primetime ads, while a Super Bowl commercial matched 1,455.
"The NFL remains TV's most-watched programming event — and continues to prove that the biggest audiences also drive meaningful consumer action long after the final whistle," said Jim Minnich, senior vice president of revenue and yield management at Disney Advertising.
The findings offer some reassurance to marketers who have watched the cost of NFL inventory climb steadily over the years. But Mr. Minnich's observation about "meaningful consumer action" points to a subtler challenge: knowing that NFL advertising works in general is different from knowing whether a particular buy worked in particular.
EDO's analysis found that performance varied considerably by category. Pharmaceutical advertisements performed 95 percent better during NFL programming than against the category's primetime benchmark, while quick-service restaurant spots were 54 percent more effective and internet and telecommunications ads came in 24 percent higher. Format mattered as well: halftime studio-show sponsorships outperformed standard signage by wide margins, and those integrations proved 30 percent more effective when paired with an adjacent traditional commercial from the same brand.
Even placement within a commercial break made a difference during the Super Bowl. The first advertisement in a pod generated 1.7 times the engagement of spots appearing later, while some late-pod positions fell 10 percent below the baseline. (The finding will not surprise anyone who has ever reached for the remote during minute four of a five-minute break.)
"Brands should use immediate, investment-grade outcomes data to test each ad and format, and then let the results, not the media plan's default assumptions, decide the mix," said Kevin Krim, chief executive of EDO.
Yet before marketers can evaluate what happened after their advertisements aired, they must first determine who saw them — and that question has grown thornier as NFL games have migrated across broadcast networks, cable channels and streaming services with very different viewing environments.
Dan Rayburn, a streaming media analyst who has tracked the economics of online video for more than 25 years, said the industry lacks a consistent definition of basic terms. "In the industry, we can't even count," Mr. Rayburn said. "We don't even know what a viewer is."
Mr. Rayburn noted that audience reporting can rely on total audience delivery, average minute audience, simultaneous streams or concurrent streams — each of which describes viewing differently, though the resulting figures often end up being compared as if they were equivalent. He pointed to Amazon's Thursday Night Football, where a game can appear in a window while a shopper browses the retailer's site. If that person never interacts with the broadcast and leaves after several seconds, Mr. Rayburn asked, should they count as a viewer?
The question became more than theoretical last season, when YouTube revised its initially reported audience for an NFL broadcast upward by roughly two million viewers several days after the game. For advertisers who had already purchased inventory based on projected delivery, Mr. Rayburn said, a correction of that magnitude raises uncomfortable questions about how the figures were calculated in the first place.
None of this suggests that NFL advertising has somehow become a poor investment. The league's games remain, by a considerable margin, the most-watched programming on American television, and EDO's data indicates that the audiences they attract are unusually engaged. But as viewing fragments across platforms with different measurement standards and viewing behaviors, the simple question of what a marketer got for the money has acquired a few more variables.
The NFL, for its part, will continue selling advertising time at premium prices. Whether everyone agrees on how to count the people watching is, apparently, a separate matter.
Original story published in The Drum: "NFL ads deliver big returns. But which numbers can marketers trust? | The Drum"