Reaching Football Audiences (Free Report From VIZIO)

There’s been a long-held assumption that NFL and college football TV audiences don’t necessarily overlap, and that you must advertise against games to reach fans in general. These assumptions inform a lot of spending decisions…. but are they correct?

A new data-driven report from VIZIO takes a look at each audience and the overlap and finds, among other things, they aren’t that different from one another. And that brands with a heavy emphasis on the NFL and college football actually aren’t getting a ton of extra reach by advertising during both. 

VIZIO looked at TV audiences from Aug. 28, 2021 through Feb. 13, 2022 to reveal just how much NFL and college football audiences overlap, plus how much of minutes watched are actually on programming beyond live sports.

Some of the key findings, based on Inscape ACR data: 

• The audience watching NFL and NCAA football games are extremely similar. Only 3.7% of VIZIO TVs watch college football exclusively, while 13.3% exclusively tune into NFL games. Meanwhile, the audience for both is 22% of VIZIO TVs.

• Related: Over 56% of NFL and college football audiences watch both, and just 9.5% are only watching college football.

• Sports fans watch more non-sports programming than they do sports. Football audiences spend more than three-fourths of their TV time watching non-sport content. Those who exclusively watch only NFL or NCAA football games spend about 90% of their TV time on non-sports content, while heavy NFL/NCAA viewers still spend more than two-thirds of their time on other types of programming

Knowing how viewers spend time with TV programming allows for a smarter, more sophisticated approach to advertising that maximizes ROI. 

Most major TV advertisers appear during sports programming, which can effectively reach certain audiences. But those same viewers are also watching plenty of lower-cost programming. With the right data, brands appearing during sporting events can locate those audiences and maintain reach while reducing waste within ad budgets.

Click here to download the full (free) report from our thought leader partners at VIZIO. 

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