President Trump held a call with league commissioners from all the major US sports leagues in which he said that he hopes to have fans back in stadiums and arenas by August and September — when the NFL's regular-season normally begins, per sources to ESPN.

most ad buyers are halting spend on major sports
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It's still about five months away from the beginning of the NFL's season, and as of March 12, the NFL said it had "no plans to move the start of the league year," per ESPN. But one ESPN college football analyst said he'd be "shocked" if the 2020 NFL and college football seasons happen on time this fall.

While it's hard to speculate whether or not the league will postpone the start of its 2020-21 regular season, the league has taken some action so far — it postponed offseason activities like team workouts on March 16, and moved the 2020 NFL Draft to a TV-only event, which teams will now have to conduct virtually.  

NFL programming has outsize value to TV networks and the advertisers — and its value is only ballooning further as audiences fragment across various platforms:

  • NFL live game programming accounts for the majority of the most-watched programming on traditional TV. In 2019, live sports accounted for 88 of the most-watched TV broadcasts, of which 73 were NFL games, per Ad Age. The same was true in 2018, when live sports accounted for 89 of the top 100 most-watched telecasts, of which 61 were NFL games. To that extent, traditional TV itself has been called a delivery system for the NFL.
  • As a result, the NFL has become a juggernaut of TV ad spending, blowing other programming — including live sports — out of the water. Brands spent $4.48 billion on TV advertising during broadcasts of the NFL's 2019 regular season, up 13.5% year-over-year (YoY), with top spending categories being automotive and telecom, per iSpot.tv analysis. That's not including spending during the playoffs (which generated $928.6 million in TV spend in January 2019 alone, per iSpot.tv) and the Super Bowl, which generated another $435 million in 2020, per Kantar estimates. That far eclipses the $1.25 billion advertisers had committed to the Tokyo Olympics before they were postponed, per NBC. And NFL total ad spending will likely rise even higher going forward, as both the playoffs and the regular season have been expanded.

With most sports off the airwaves, advertisers have already pulled, cut, or paused much of their spending on sports — and an NFL postponement would simply worsen that trend. The cancellation or postponement of live sports events has thrown billions of dollars in TV ad spend commitments into a state of limbo. Some could ultimately evaporate entirely if seasons don't resume, or if networks don't manage to secure "make-good" solutions with advertisers.

For the time being, most ad buyers who had planned to advertise on live sports events that have been disrupted by the pandemic are halting spend — as one ad buyer said, "No sports means no budget for sports sites/networks." In fact, more than one-third of advertisers said they have either pulled, canceled, or paused ad budgets from linear broadcast TV (41%) and linear cable TV (34%), respectively — and that pullback is largely due to buyers cutting budgets around major live sports events, per Advertiser Perceptions.

Given the sweeping uncertainty that pervades live sports in 2020, brands that have historically run ads on NFL games need to have strong contingency plans in place — and they should take cues from how audiences respond to alternative content experimentation by networks and leagues.

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