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Streaming and Live Sports, a Marriage Made in Advertiser Heaven
Why streaming platforms' coverage of live sports may give advertisers an easy win
The first sporting event to air on television was the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, which featured American sprinter Jesse Owens. From there it's been off to the races.
For nearly a century, the excitement of live sports and the capabilities of TV have made for a natural — and lucrative — marriage. Today, live sports telecasts dominate the medium. In 2023, an astonishing 93 of the top 100 most-watched TV shows were NFL-related programming.
The biggest brands in the world, including Gatorade, UPS, and Verizon, have sponsored live sports on linear television for years — in some cases decades. For advertisers, live sports telecasts in an increasingly fragmented TV universe deliver large audiences, including the hard-to-reach young male demographic. Featuring natural conflict in a brand-safe environment on the biggest screen in the house, live sports telecasts attract engaged viewers, who, enmeshed in the suspense of the game, are less likely to skip ads.
And now the next big shift in sports viewing is underway: live sports telecasts on streaming platforms.
For advertisers, it's game on.
Live-streamed sports offer enormous opportunities for brands. They're a venue for advertisers to reach the audience of cord-cutters and cord-nevers. They're a way to leverage advanced creative for personalization, engagement, and even commerce. And they're a chance to gain measurement insight that simply isn't available on linear TV.
Viewers, Lots of Them, Are Streaming Live Sports
If marketers are skeptical about whether viewers have taken to watching live sports on streaming platforms, here are a few stats that might change their minds:
- Overall streaming viewership of television surged past 40 percent in June 2024 for the first time ever, according to Nielsen.
- A report by PWC projects that the number of U.S. viewers who stream a sports event at least once monthly will increase to 90 million in 2025 — compared with 57 million in 2021.
- NBCUniversal streamed 23.5 billion minutes of Olympics coverage during the 2024 Games, according to Emarketer.
- The NFL's opening game of the 2024 season, which aired on both linear and streaming, reached a peak audience of 55.6 million viewers, half of whom watched via streaming platforms such as Peacock and YouTube TV, Adweek reports.
The eyeballs are a good reason to advertise on live-streamed sports, and ad dollars are certainly in pursuit of these viewers. Connected (CTV) advertising spending in general is anticipated to surpass $40 billion by 2027 in the United States, which would amount to more than 100 percent growth since 2022, according to Statista.
The number of viewers tuning into live-streamed sports should only increase in the future. These streamed telecasts of live sports are poised to become even more compelling opportunities for interactivity and personalization, such as live chats, polls, quizzes, multi-angle views, and virtual and augmented reality. On its streaming telecasts, the Spanish soccer league La Liga is already experimenting with offering multiple camera angles and enabling viewers to access overlays of real-time statistics.
It's More Like DCOooooh!
With its digital nature, CTV offers new strategies for personalization not available on linear TV. First, there's dynamic creative optimization (DCO). Just as it does online, this kind of advertising enables brands to personalize their messaging at scale, making it more relevant to specific audiences. With DCO, brands create versions of ads based on a single template, where elements — such as images, text, headlines, and background colors — are automatically swapped out based on data signals like geolocation, weather, and daypart. For instance, a DCO ad for a convenience store might feature coffee for a viewer in New England and fountain drinks for a viewer in Phoenix.
According to Innovid's "CTV Advertising Insights Report," DCO ads deliver an average of 37 seconds of additional engagement compared with standard video ads.
Interactive Ads Generate that Lean-Forward Feeling
If TV is a lean-back experience, interactive ads can make CTV a lean-forward medium. Designed to drive engagement, interactive ads can feature QR codes, product galleries, and digital coupons. With interactive ads, marketers get clear insights from how a user engages with the ad, an interaction that provides data on how they can optimize their campaigns. The knowledge that a consumer engaged with a QR code, looked at a specific product in a gallery, or scanned a coupon gives insight into segmenting that prospect for retargeting or other sequential ads. A subset of interactive advertising — shoppable ads — enable advertisers to compress the funnel with elements like store locators and add-to-cart buttons to drive sales.
Powerful Measurement Capabilities not Available On Linear TV
The measurement capabilities of CTV may be an even more compelling reason than interactivity to advertise on live-streamed sports. Because CTV is digital, brands and agencies have deeper insight into ad performance. No longer are advertisers guessing how many people saw their 30-second spot based on a "currency" or hoping their campaign drives engagement.
Instead, CTV advertising enables brands to get a precise count of impressions, reach, frequency, and outcomes for their campaigns, often in real time.
With the right ad server and measurement platform, brands can gauge performance throughout the funnel to make sure they're efficient with their media buys and automatically optimize their campaigns to realize maximum ROI and drive revenue. In fact, Innovid's report found that interactive ads generate 92 additional seconds of engagement compared with standard pre-roll video, and they achieve an engagement rate 10 times that of standard video.
This Isn't the Future — It's Now
Here's the thing about live-streamed sports: It's a trend that's already here. And it's not only gaining in popularity, it's quickening streaming adoption rates.
For advertisers, live-streamed sports is an opportunity not to be passed up. The broadcasters of the Olympics back in 1936 couldn't begin to imagine how linear TV has been transformed, let alone the streaming-based future the medium sprints toward now.
Innovid is a partner in the ANA Thought Leadership Program.
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