A Lesson from the NFL

Consider, Create & Covet New Audiences…Everywhere, All the Time!

With the Super Bowl coming, we thought we’d explore a bit of a different angle than reviewing new ads. Let’s run a go route directly into one of the NFL’s greatest strengths: expanding its audience. Four downs, limitless learnings. Here we go…

First Down:
Simulcasts work.

Breakdown:
The league has been developing/greenlighting simulcasts for a few years. The NFL on Nickelodeon started in 2021 in the Wild Card round of the playoffs. Since then, there have been a bunch of simulcasts tied to important moments. SpongeBob, Rugrats, Ninja Turtles—lots of tie-ins that kids love (and maybe parents too). This year, the Super Bowl is one of those moments, and the ad inventory on Nickelodeon sold out quickly. Most spots will be the same across Nick and CBS, but several will differ based on the differences in the audiences.

Some of you might also be familiar with the ManningCast, ESPN’s Monday Night Football simulcast hosted by Peyton and Eli Manning. They banter with each other and analyze the game, while also bringing in special guests to participate. From Will Ferrell to Caitlin Clark, Mark Wahlberg to Tiffany Haddish, this is not your dad’s Monday Night Football broadcast. Entertainment is the key, as opposed to X’s and O’s.

Purists in the audience might think, “Who gives a sh!t about Nickelodeon? Why would I want to watch the Mannings and irrelevant guests tell jokes for three hours?” Well, these simulcasts ARE NOT FOR YOU. That’s the point. The NFL is masterfully expanding its audience way, way beyond the purists. Smart.

Second Down:
Streaming is not the future. It’s the PRESENT.

Breakdown:
Of the 100 most-watched linear TV broadcasts in 2022, 84 were NFL games. Even for someone who loves football, that number just seems astounding. Understatement of the year: the NFL produces a very desirable product.

The thing is, live sports are heading to the streamers, which has been driven by—you guessed it—the NFL. When they inked the deal with Amazon Prime Video in 2021 for the exclusive rights to air Thursday Night Football, many fans felt betrayed. (By the way, Amazon paid $11 billion to the NFL for those rights for 11 years.) On the surface, it seemed like something was being taken away from fans, like the NFL was making TNF more exclusive.

However, two years into the partnership, viewership has grown significantly from the first season to the second. TNF averaged 11.86 million viewers per game this past season. That’s still a bit less than the average viewership in the final year of the FOX/NFL Network TNF broadcast (12.9 million viewers per game), but double-digit percentage growth bodes well for the future

Two more recent streaming deals—one with YouTube for the Sunday Ticket package and another with Peacock for exclusive rights to a prime-time playoff game—look like harbingers of things to come. Consumer preferences, demographics, and technology (along with billions of dollars) are driving the NFL’s decisions and, in turn, broadening their audiences. Not to go unmentioned, it’s also clear that the NFL is “training” audiences to accept new ways of following the league.

Third Down:
Think globally. Act globally.

Breakdown:
“Football is American.” That’s quaint. For some people, they’d like to keep it that way. None of those people work in marketing.

If you’re a fan of American football, you’ve likely noticed that the NFL is playing multiple games per season outside the U.S. In 2023, there were five regular season games played in Europe—three in the UK and two in Germany. Next season, there will be five international games again, with one of them being played for the first time in Brazil. The thing is, this is not the sum of the NFL’s global efforts. It’s simply the most public.

There are at least two other prongs in the NFL’s global expansion strategy: building local and regional fan bases and inspiring athletes outside the U.S. to play football.

The league’s Global Markets Program enables individual teams to invest in specific markets to increase fan engagement and commercialize products. For example, in 2023 the New Orleans Saints were granted international marketing rights in France, the first team to focus on that market. According to NFL Football Operations, the current markets that are part of the program include Austria, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ghana, Mexico, New Zealand, Republic of Ireland, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK.

The process by which teams acquire these rights is intriguing. They essentially have to make a case for why they will be successful in a given market, and the NFL’s International Committee approves or rejects the application. This enables the NFL to grow very strategically and likely align a host of other efforts in those markets based on resources, scale, and opportunity. It also places quite a bit of the effort and financial commitment onto the individual teams. Pretty savvy way to expand audiences.

They’re also growing the game itself (and, consequently, the audience) through their International Player Pathway Program, which gives teams the chance to find and work with extraordinary global athletes with the potential for a career in American football. Additionally, there has been a heavy focus in recent years on promoting NFL FLAG, which gives younger players around the world the opportunity to get into the game at sort of an intro level through flag football.

Fourth Down:
Taylor Swift is awesome.

Breakdown:
She is one of the best artists in history, and I probably don’t need to go into any detail about her popularity. While the NFL didn’t ask for her to become part of the league, they got very, very lucky that she did.

Taylor is certainly not the first celebrity who has been shown multiple times on sports broadcasts, but she is probably the one who has attracted the most new viewers. All the NFL really needed to do was embrace it, which they did. Just a few Instagram and X posts—and temporarily changing their X handle to NFL (Taylor’s Version), which only Swifties would truly understand—and they garnered good will with a massive, massive fan base. (Side note: For those who have become “tired” of seeing Taylor during broadcasts, I urge you to think about people like Jack Nicholson at Lakers games, Spike Lee at Knicks games, and Matthew McConaughey at Texas Longhorns games. The amount of criticism and negativity aimed at those guys over the years has been near zero. No one would shake their heads and question how much they deserved the attention. In fact, most of the time it has been celebrated. Keep that in mind when you see Taylor on the screen while you’re watching the games.)

As usual, the NFL employed strategy (and simple logic) to expand its audience, especially its female viewership and a younger generation of consumers. If you’re a fan of the sport and the league, you surely must understand how increasing audience and engaging new consumers will actually benefit the game itself, boosting demand, pumping more resources into the NFL’s budget, and building a bigger, more passionate fan base.

In conclusion, as a marketer, an advertiser, or simply a business leader, evaluating how an organization like the NFL continually focuses on expanding its audience can help you think more strategically and more creatively. Who should know about your brand who currently doesn’t? Why don’t they? Contact Planit for help answering these questions and more.