Sports Advertising Is More Expensive And Crowded Than Ever. Here’s How Brands Can Stand Out

Sports are by nature a competitive activity. Athletes and teams spend their entire lives training and strategizing to gain any advantage they can over their competitors, with the difference between winning and losing often coming down to mere inches.

The same can be said for advertising on sports as well. During the 2023-2024 NFL season, over 22,000 advertisers vied for viewers’ attention with :15, :30, and :60 minute spots, not to mention sponsoring halftime shows, game breaks, and more. For the same NBA season, the number was 24,000.

That’s a highly competitive, cluttered space. And when you combine the fact that some companies dedicated as much as 30% of their upfront budget to single sports moments, you get a pretty clear picture of the implications sports have on today’s advertising ecosystem.

In today’s TV landscape, sports programming is considered the last vestige of appointment viewing… where advertisers can be sure that a meaningful number of viewers are engaging in the same program at the same time. That creates unprecedented demand with a two-pronged effect… some brands will get priced out of the game completely, and all other media investments will suffer for lack of available (and flexible) budget to allocate to them.

There’s also more competition to air games among service providers, with broadcasters now competing with streaming for rights. Apple paid $2.5 billion for exclusive rights to Major League Soccer (MLS) for the next 10 years. NBC is now paying 4x of what it initially invested in the English Premier League just to defend those rights from competitors. And just in football alone you have Monday Night Football (ESPN), Sunday Night Football (NBC/Peacock), and Thursday Night Football (Amazon) all airing on different platforms, not to mention multiple ways to watch regular games every Sunday.

The costs of these rights create ROI pressure, further driving up advertising costs in different ways. For instance, many broadcasters sell sports advertising as part of a bundle to include ads in other types of programming.

The result is an expensive, competitive space that nearly singlehandedly supports the entire Upfront cycle. What’s more, you have advertisers seeking a new outlet for their higher-reach, lower-cost media buys, and finding a home in the FAST market. So you have this supported video ad budget that used to sit in Upfronts coming to the streaming marketplace.

And those are just the challenges that brands experience. For fans, the biggest challenge in streaming remains “Where do I find my stuff?” That question applies as much to sports programming as it does any other form of entertainment.

Fortunately, there’s one solution to both advertiser and fan dilemmas. It all comes down to presentation. How do you design for what’s popular and what’s organic to a customer? Put the things they want to watch in one easy-to-find place.

When viewers power up their smart TVs, they’re looking for content, not apps. They don’t want a smartphone-like maze of app icons to search for what they want to watch.

This is especially important for highly fragmented content like sports. That’s one reason why at VIZIO, we decided to put sports fans front and center with our all-new VIZIO Sports Zone games and content hub. This new centralized discovery experience — accessible from the VIZIO Home screen — brings together the top live broadcasts and on-demand content across multiple streaming apps into one place.

Whether fans are seeking a specific game, or multiple games of a common sport, they just want to see their options aggregated into one spot. Rather than force them to open multiple streaming services to check which one is carrying their game, presenting them with the game they seek along with all the different streaming services they can choose from to watch it, has benefits for both viewers and advertisers.  

What we’ve found is that great customer experiences translate to great brand opportunities. Aggregating content into broad-reaching themes and collections gives brands an opportunity to reach a wide audience in one piece of advertising real estate before they begin their viewing experience.

For instance, a brand can sponsor a page within the VIZIO Sports Zone that includes a custom collection of game-day content, like what we offered during this year’s NFL Big Game Day, or for the college basketball tournament. This gives participating brands sole ownership of that space, as opposed to competing with dozens of other advertisers around a single game, and it captures the attention of viewers before they start watching the game itself.

For brands under pressure to get the most bang for their buck with their sports advertising budget, and reach a wider spectrum of viewers when they’re most engaged in the TV browsing experience, this kind of hub-based sponsorship offers a new tool in their TV ad toolkit created with today’s unique viewing landscape in mind.

The TV landscape has changed, with the fragmentation of content across disparate services and providers complicating the path viewers must take to reach their content destination of choice. It’s caused us at VIZIO to re-evaluate how we present content, and what role we can play to make it easier for viewers and brands alike.

Brands struggling to navigate this new paradigm can similarly re-evaluate how they allocate their advertising dollars to compensate as well. They now have the opportunity to put their mark not just as one of many advertisers during game breaks, but on the access point to the game on an exclusive basis.

That’s how you turn a challenge into an advantage.