NFL Thanksgiving Matchups Won’t Spoil the Feast for Advertisers

There are worse things than the New York Giants, although admittedly not a lot of them.

Thursday’s main course is one example; turkey may be the clucking embodiment of a sort of Tebow-esque blandness, but that’s only when it’s not trying to kill you. E. coli and salmonella often lurk in the store-bought birds, while their free-range, free-love country cousins are rife with avian chlamydiosis and lung fungus. And a hale and hearty bird is no prize either, what with that red ear-lobey thing hanging from his neck.

And yet, for all that, something like 80 million Americans this week will take to the highways and skies, traveling far and wide to partake in the communal feast of ritual mediocrity. And while the late-afternoon NFL matchup promises to be about as palatable as a Jell-O salad—hooves and marshmallows: two great tastes that go great together—roughly half of these road warriors will slip away from the table to watch the Giants take on the Dallas Cowboys in the House that Jerry Built. That’s how traditions work. We do things we don’t always enjoy, because some people, now long dead, thought it was a good idea when they were still calling the shots.

If the prospect of a 4-7 Dallas team playing host to a 2-9 Giants squad doesn’t necessarily light up the neural pleasure centers, Fox can take comfort in the knowledge that the NFL’s 57-year-old tradition is as indispensable to the holiday as cranberry sauce. You will watch because: a) there’s nothing else on, and b) even sub-par football is still, well, football. Witness last year’s centerpiece game, a 45-10 Cowboys blowout of their NFC East rivals from the nation’s capital. While not something you’d hang in the Louvre, CBS’ broadcast gobbled up an average draw of 41.8 million viewers, making it the NFL’s second-biggest regular-season game. As in, ever.

Customs and habits alone don’t account for those eye-popping deliveries, which were juiced by a change in how Nielsen counts the house. The addition of out-of-home deliveries to the national sample in September 2020 has unearthed legions of ghost fans–stealth viewers who for decades had been left unaccounted for by the service that provides the transactional data underpinning the $80 billion TV ad market.

As much as “out-of-home” deliveries are generally associated with the bonus eyeballs that accumulate in public venues such as bars, restaurants, gyms and other public venues, Nielsen’s portable data-harvesting tech also allows it to measure viewership that occurs in other people’s residences. As such, the OOH tweak has utterly transformed the way advertisers think about the NFL’s annual Thanksgiving feast.

For example, out-of-home deliveries accounted for 17.3 million of CBS’ overall Commanders-Cowboys audience in 2023, or more than two-fifths (41%) of the network’s gametime reach. Eliminate those impressions as a sort of pre-2020 thought exercise, and the turnout for last year’s showcase drops to 24.5 million viewers, and while that’s still a solid number—the average primetime entertainment series draws just 3.54 million per episode—it certainly wouldn’t justify the rates advertisers pay for each in-game unit.

And those rates have never been higher. According to advance booking data from Guideline, which captures actual agency investment from the six major U.S. holding companies as well as most of the large independent shops, the average unit cost for the three Thanksgiving Day games on CBS, Fox and NBC works out to nearly $1.5 million per each 30-second spot. That marks a 16% increase from last season’s rates.

While Fox’s broadcast is the most expensive Turkey Day buy, Guideline does not publicly disclose each network’s individual rates. Suffice it to say that the three NFL partners stand to make a killing on Thursday, and when Amazon Prime’s Black Friday stream and the Sunday lineup of broadcasts are tossed into the holiday mix, the league’s key rightsholders can expect to walk away with some $570 million in ad revenue. (The average rate for a single unit across this Sunday’s NFL slate is a hearty $576,000 a throw, up 11% versus the year-ago period.) 

As much as Fox’s holiday showcase is expected to serve up the greatest number of eyeballs, the turnout for the other two games should be impressive as well. CBS has the Bears and Lions teed up for the early window, an NFC North grudge match that features the best team in the league taking on the representative of the country’s third-largest media market. (Chicagoland is home to 3.7 million TV households, accounting for nearly 3% of the national base.) Last year’s Packers-Lions game averaged 31.7 million viewers on Fox, good for second place on the season.

NBC, for its part, will be raking it in all the livelong day, commanding an average unit cost of $900,000 for its broadcast of the 97^th Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (last year’s event averaged 22.3 million linear-TV viewers) before settling in for a little dog show action ahead of the main event in primetime. Including the 1.6 million streaming impressions garnered via Peacock, NBC’s coverage of the one-sided 49ers-Seahawks capper averaged just shy of 27 million viewers; this year’s matchup features a rare meeting between Tua Tagovailoa’s Miami Dolphins and Jordan Love’s Green Bay Packers. A product of the fearsome NFC north, the 8-3 Pack are a virtual shoo-in for a Wild Card berth.

All told, the NFL’s TV partners have boosted their total in-game ad revenue by 10% versus the year-ago period, while ratings are up 1%. Last season’s spend was up 14% on a 7% hike in deliveries.

“Thanksgiving weekend highlights the unmatched value of sports in video advertising,” said Alberto Leyes, head of product strategy at Guideline. “With the NFL driving nearly 70% of national TV, advertisers see this holiday as a prime opportunity for massive reach and engagement despite double-digit growth in unit rates.”

Live sports continues to power the TV ad market, which dipped 3% in 2023. According to Guideline data, entertainment dollars were down 16% a year ago, while sports spend grew 21%.

As long as Americans continue to abide by the over-the-river-and-through-the-woods travel dynamic, there will always be an outsized audience for football on the fourth Thursday in November. Perhaps Grandmother moved to Rhode Island without telling anyone, and maybe some ill-mannered strangers live in her house now, but as long as we keep the old traditions alive, the NFL will remain a cultural touchstone until the turkeys rise up and peck us all to death or the sun burns itself out. Scientists say the latter isn’t likely to happen for another 5 billion years, while there’s absolutely no danger of an avian revolt. But for Giants fans (like me), turkeys are the dumbest animals on the planet.

More from Sportico.com

Best of Sportico.com

Sign up for Sportico’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.