Commentary

Few NFL Advertisers Score On The 'Informative' Metric For Viewers

If you are a big NFL TV advertiser, you may already have a lot of TV commercials placed so far this year -- as well as whatever costs go into production.

That's good news because it’s live, premium TV -- the biggest TV program in terms of traditional TV viewing -- and the priciest.

But for the high price tag, are those viewers really getting anything from this?

A recent poll showed that just a handful of NFL TV marketers this season are getting a majority of viewers to believe their messaging is “informative.” Forget about engagement, website traffic, in-store traffic, or any of your preferred key performance indicators. This isn’t good.

Modern media consumers know where to go for “informative” stuff -- via a website, Facebook landing page, or whatever. Either way, it doesn’t seem to aid the consumer experience. Perhaps some fast-forwarding would be an option if available. And a note: “Your ad will finish in just five seconds!”

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A recent survey showed only two spots -- Microsoft and IBM -- where the majority of respondents believe those commercials were “informative.”

IBM ad focused on a farmer making Dole products talking about a recall that can harm business. A blockchain IBM service helped pinpoint a problem.

The Microsoft commercial talked about tracking and protecting the snow leopard in Asia, where Microsoft software can scan through hundreds of thousands of images -- through many cameras placed in the wild -- looking for the features that make a snow leopard, a snow leopard, to get a more accurate population count. This calculation can be done in 10 minutes versus say 10 days.

Microsoft “informative” score: 62%. IBM was at a 54%.

McDonald's, T-Mobile, Grubhub, Progresssive, Apple, DoorDash, ebay, Amazon, State Farm, Allstate, Tide, Geico, AT&T and Nationwide scored from a high of 47% (for McDonalds) to a low of 13% (for Nationwide) on this “informative” question.

Other factors that were examined: Whether the ad was believable, funny, unique, had a positive impression, was shareable, emotionally appealing, relevant, or contained new information.

Bottom line: NFL marketers are hoping their consumers cross the goal line -- wherever theirs is. If not, they are probably headed elsewhere.

Looking at the early data, NFL interceptions may be up this year.

1 comment about "Few NFL Advertisers Score On The 'Informative' Metric For Viewers".
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  1. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, October 30, 2019 at 9:52 a.m.

    Wayne, a lot of TV commercials are not necessarily trying to be "informative". Some go for humor, others for demonstrations or endorsements, still others are shown merely to stimulate brand awareness as they really have little else to say. In any event, even if the research was done objectively, one needs a comparison between the performance of TV ads in NFL games with how the same ads did in other venues---primetime entertainment fare, news, etc. If the results are the sameĀ  then the use of NFL games as opposed to other types of TV content has no particular significance.

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