Live sports, holiday movies boost engagement on TV: report

Not all TV programming is equal, as most of us know from channel-surfing or scrolling to find something we want to watch on streaming. The same sentiment applies to advertisers.

For the TV industry, this holiday season may represent a continuation of recent volatility according to EDO, between the impacts of the recent writers’ and ongoing actors’ strikes, ever-growing streaming options, and a soft upfronts season earlier this year. Still, there’s valuable ad inventory for marketers to take advantage of if they know where to look, according to EDO’s Holiday TV Outcomes report released this month.

Red zone: Retailers that showed ads during NFL games the week of Thanksgiving last year saw a more than 300% spike in engagement rate—aka ad effectiveness per person, per second—compared to the previous week. Ads that aired on any live sporting event held on Black Friday in particular outperformed other programming on that day by 12%, EDO found.

While afternoon Thanksgiving games tend to draw more viewers, the evening slot was better for ad engagement last year, per EDO. Ads that ran in last year’s Thanksgiving prime-time NFL game were 70% more likely to result in engagement than the prime-time average.

“It’s a really sustained lift that [brands] get from being in the NFL on Thanksgiving,” EDO CEO Kevin Krim told Marketing Brew. “Well worth the premium you have to pay, in our view, based on our data, to be in the Thanksgiving NFL games.”

For brands that don’t play ball with the NFL, there’s also college football. Outside of the College Football Playoff National Championship, the NCAA New Year’s Six bowl games marked the top college football games of the year in terms of engagement, with last season’s ads in those games proving 71% more effective at generating engagement than the prime-time average outside of live sports.

Brands that sponsored one of the bowl games last season, including Chick-fil-A, Allstate, and Vrbo, tended to outperform other brands that ran ads during those games, EDO found.

Holiday cheer: There are opportunities outside of sports to drive audience engagement. Engagement with ads that aired during holiday movies last year decreased by 9% compared to 2021, according to EDO, but some titles, like A Christmas Carol, Jingle All the Way, and The Nightmare Before Christmas, still performed well for advertisers. People who watched A Christmas Carol last year, for instance, were 29% more likely to engage with brands that advertised during the movie compared to the average across holiday movies.

Elf, released in 2003, and Home Alone, released in 1990, were among the top performers, but overall, newer holiday movies—aka those released in the 21st century—tended to drive slightly more engagement than those released in the ’90s and earlier.

“Movies aired on TV are a great environment, generally, for advertising,” Krim said. “I think it’s a sort of overlooked category out there, and often it’s very reasonably priced from an advertisers point of view…People don’t think of that as the sexy place to be from a media perspective, but they’re good at keeping the consumer engaged with both the content and the ads. Holiday movies just amplify that [dynamic].”