• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, October 30, 2019

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!”

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.