What Advertisers Can Gain from the NFL’s Fragmented Season
Long gone are the days of "are the 49ers on CBS or Fox this week?" Now, figuring out where your team is playing on any given Sunday means checking against one of nine different platforms that will carry NFL games this season: CBS, FOX, ESPN, ABC, NBC, Peacock, Prime Video, Netflix, and NFL Network. Fans sort it out because the games are worth it.
Advertisers have a harder version of the same problem when trying to reach that audience.
A season-long NFL investment can mean working with half a dozen sellers or more, each with its own measurement tools and its own version of how the campaign is actually performing. Live sports have always been the crown jewel of media inventory, and the NFL sits at the top of it, which is exactly why everyone wants a piece, and why the audience ends up scattered.
This makes the NFL a particularly visible test of CTV’s promise. Streaming offers richer signals to optimize against, including the potential to connect exposure with outcomes on other devices. Getting value from those signals requires advertisers to address the fragmentation that separates them. Otherwise, the cost of fragmentation can outweigh the value of richer signals.
Putting richer signals to work
The same fragmentation that makes buying a headache is also what makes measuring better than it used to be. For most of NFL history, "watching football" meant one broadcast, one audience number, and not much else. Streaming changes that math. It brings richer signals, including the ability to connect someone seeing an ad during the game to what they do afterward, on another device, days later. A premium sports placement can become the start of a real customer relationship instead of a one-off impression. Given what premium sports inventory costs, it deserves to be part of the investment case.
The catch is that you only get the upgrade if you can actually connect the signals across sellers, and right now, most advertisers can't. Each platform only sees its own slice of the journey. A household reached across three different games on three different platforms shows up in three separate audience reports; add those up, and you've overstated your reach. The same thing happens with conversions: multiple partners can each have a legitimate-looking claim to crediting the same purchase. We’re talking about more than a minor reporting quirk. This can mislead campaign allocation decisions. A team might pour more budget into whichever partner shows the best numbers, when really that partner just has the most generous attribution window, not the best results. Even granular, platform-by-platform reporting doesn't fix this, because the problem isn't a lack of data, but a disconnected measurement overview.
Make measurement part of the buy
Measurement has to become part of the buy versus something to be figured out afterward. Before committing to an NFL package (or any premium live sports buy), advertisers need a plan for how its data will connect to the rest of their media mix. That starts with a consistent definition of a conversion that holds no matter which platform the ad ran on. From there, pressure-test each partner's attribution window against that definition, and see what can be compared across sellers versus what can't.
A platform may accurately report that an exposed household later purchased, while another platform has an equally valid claim to the same observation. Deciding how to allocate the next round of spending requires evaluating those exposures together against the advertiser’s outcomes. That evaluation needs to sit outside any one seller’s attribution framework, so that a consistent set of rules governs how contributions are assessed across the campaign.
Where it's feasible, independent incrementality testing is the best way to sanity-check all of it.
Do that work, and the payoff compounds over a season: overlap data can reshape the next placement, and understanding which exposures lead to real customer relationships can sharpen spending well outside the NFL package itself. Skip it, and you're paying premium prices for a fragmented, double-counted view of your own audience.
As more of the sports calendar follows football's lead from linear to streaming, this is bigger than just the NFL season. It's the preview for CTV buying generally. The advertisers who build the ability to reconcile measurement across sellers in CTV (and yes, across all of their media mix) now will carry that edge into every buy that comes after.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from AppsFlyer. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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