How advertisers can prepare for this NFL season

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for advertisers.

Of course, we’re referring to a new NFL season, which begins Sept. 9 with a Super Bowl rematch between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots.

New data released today from EDO shows that the average 2025-26 regular-season NFL ad drove the same impact as 73 ads on prime-time TV, a 15% increase from the 2024-25 season. In other words, one ad running during an NFL game equates to the same engagement — how effective it was and how many people it reached — as 73 ads running during a night of regular TV.

The NFL’s massive audience may have a lot to do with that. It accounted for 83 of the 100 most-watched U.S. telecasts of 2025, and that’s just on linear TV. On streaming, the league has landed deals with Prime Video, Netflix, Peacock and YouTube to expand its audience even further. This expansion across the media ecosystem has rewired how and where fans watch, and, therefore, how advertisers plan.

Ads during streaming-exclusive games were 66% more effective than those on linear, according to Laura Grover, senior vice president and head of client solutions at EDO.

“It’s fair to say the NFL will remain the single biggest stage in American media; nothing else reliably assembles that much live, leaned-in attention,” said Kevin Dunn, chief revenue officer at Experian Marketing Services.

“But we need to look at the NFL’s media rights as a portfolio [rather than as a single line item],” he added.

The opportunities in fragmentation

NFL attention is fragmented across networks and platforms this season more than ever before. Netflix, in particular, emerged as a stronger contender this year, addingmore games this season to its two Christmas Day games that include a Week 1 game in Australia; the league’s first-ever Thanksgiving Eve game; and a game during the final week of the regular season.

As the NFL spreads, and other leagues vie for a slice of the pie, experts say advertisers’ strategies will have to evolve to focus on outcomes and measurement.

“When the NFL was on three networks, ‘reach’ was a reasonable proxy for impact. That math doesn’t hold anymore,” Grover said.

“But fragmentation means fans are self-sorting by platform and format, which is actually a gift to marketers who can measure it: It’s a built-in segmentation tool. The brands that get hurt are the ones still buying and reporting on this season the way they did five years ago.”

It also means fans are engaging with content beyond live games, whether it’s highlights on social media, coverage on podcasts or news apps and more.

“However, most sports marketing strategies are still built around isolated, event-based buying, which severely limits their full potential,” said Ria Madrid, vice president of global advertising at Wurl. “Without the ability to connect these touchpoints, brands miss opportunities to engage fans consistently and within context — especially during high-attention moments outside of the live broadcast.”

NFL fandom isn’t a ‘monolith’

Localized strategies in smaller markets could help marketers break through the noise of NFL games. According to recent research by Madhive, smaller markets are more loyal, watching more weeks of the season on average than the top 10 markets.

And there’s a lot of overlap with football fans: 64% of households that watch college football on Saturday watch the NFL the following day, according to Madhive’s data.

Kevin McElroy, chief revenue officer at Infolinks Media, echoed that advertisers should be planning for a broader audience than what they may have built their traditional playbooks around.

But it’s not just because of the different platforms or touchpoints they’re engaging with or the markets where they’re watching.

“The biggest shift is that the NFL audience is no longer as monolithic as many marketers still assume,” McElroy said. “The NFL’s international expansion has broadened its reach beyond traditional U.S. audiences, creating a fan base that is more geographically and culturally diverse.”