Advertising Takeaways From A Transformative College Football Season

The 2024 College Football (CFB) season arrived with significant changes, including a massive conference realignment, a matured transfer portal, evolving NIL opportunities, and, most importantly, an expanded 12-team playoff. These changes set the stage for an exciting year for college football and delivered a transformative impact on the sports and media landscape. 

Understanding the Newest Media Rights & Advertising Opportunities

As college football evolves, so too do the opportunities for advertisers to showcase their brands in native environments with college teams and players in the new era of NIL (Name, Image, & Likeness). New sponsorship opportunities this year included more expansive naming rights, like FIU’s Riccardo Silva Stadium, now named Pitbull Stadium after being purchased by music artist Pitbull for a recurring $1.2M annually. 

Another net-new opportunity across all of college football was the NCAA allowing on-field branding and signage for the 2024 season, with vendors like Learfield and Playfly, which work in the distribution of these assets for their respective licensed teams. Prominent examples include on-field logo placement in top-tier environments like Ohio Stadium. YouGov estimates of the media value for on-field signage across other programs, including: 

Lastly, NIL opportunities with college athletes are growing rapidly. The aforementioned vendors like Learfield and Playfly represent hundreds of college athletes, along with agent groups like Altius Sports, which seek to provide athletes with sponsorship opportunities from advertisers looking to promote products, brands, and services. 

One logistical element that will greatly impact the value of these universities and player opportunities in the future—determined by an NCAA settlement—is the introduction of the Power 5 (still inclusive of the Pac-12) salary cap that will dictate a yearly maximum spend of $20.5M negotiated and distributed to the athletes of all sports directly by the university. The true payroll directly from the universities to college football players is well-guarded. Reports suggest that Oregon and Ohio State paid more than $20M for their 2024 rosters. This means that much more emphasis will be placed on NIL opportunities directly with brands and selling team sponsorship assets to maintain the funding of team payrolls. 

As for the marketplace, the conferences have been realigned this year, and with that comes new distribution rights deals. The SEC’s new media rights represent an exclusive partnership with Disney’s ABC and ESPN (inclusive of SEC Network and ACC Network properties), consolidating rights previously owned by CBS, a deal that was in place for 28 years. 

This new deal is worth approximately $3B over ten years, includes the addition of powerhouses Texas and Oklahoma as they join the conference, and will increase the projected shared advertising revenue pool by over $150M. This exclusive partnership paid off for Disney, with ABC garnering 85% more viewers than its broadcast competitors; ESPN+ hit a record-high viewership, up 58%, and engagement increased by 231%. 

The Big Ten took an opposite approach and expanded its rights partners, adding CBS for its 3:30 PM ET window, and striking a new deal with NBC for its College Football on Saturday Night production, reminiscent of its NFL Sunday Night Football experience. The Big Ten deal is valued at over $7B for seven years, with CBS, Fox, the Big Ten Network, and NBC, ultimately paying more than the SEC contract. However, advertising revenue is shared across four more teams as Oregon, Washington, USC, and UCLA enter the fold. 

These unique new rights deals indicate the broadcast networks’ belief in increased ad spending as a result of these new “super conferences.” With better parity in the strength of regular season scheduling, more viewers are likely to watch marquee matchups like Oregon/Ohio State, Texas/Alabama, and Penn State/USC, creating environments for appointment television. 

This also has a major impact on advertisers who buy media locally to support DMAs rather than nationally, as West Coast teams now travel cross-country to play new conference opponents on the East Coast, blurring the lines of the audience since College Football viewership tends to be tribal to fanbases and geographics. College Football should now be viewed as regionalized rather than traditionally local, and greater emphasis should be placed on scheduled flighting to achieve the desired matchups in specific DMAs. 

In 2016, the College Football audience was most abundantly occupied by the 35-64 age range (Nielsen), but with new access to players created by NIL, star power among younger audiences is growing. Look no further than Colorado’s Travis Hunter, who has connected closely and independently with his 72k followers on Twitch, become a cover athlete for EA’s NCAA25 video game, and secured brand deals with United Airlines, Celsius, and Adidas to name a few—all before winning the Heisman Trophy this year. 

Younger fans now have access to these athletes on the platforms that meet them where they are, and Pat McAfee has brought them to places they traditionally aren’t. McAfee’s addition to College Gameday full-time is palpable in the program’s audience, with the 18-24 audience up +34% year-over-year and even the collective 18-34 audience up +14% year-over-year in viewership. 

As the trend continues, look for vendors to create their own access to this audience through CFB. This would be similar to Bleacher Report’s recent acquisition of NFL O&O rights, which allows the NFL to connect younger fans to their product as their audience ages. 

What the NFL has, and college football lacks, is scarcity. Scarcity creates luxury, and the NFL does it better than any other league through an exclusive yet sought-after viewing package in the Sunday Ticket, exclusive games behind streaming paywalls, regional blackouts, and relatively more standalone national games than the CFB. The NFL is widely considered the best product in live sports—if not all of television. 

However, over the last ten years, college football has evolved to promote more top-tier matchups during prime viewing hours. The challenge is that the CFB is saturated with an average of 67 matchups every week, which is a good problem to have, but with a wider disparity of talent between teams and a much broader distribution than the NFL, it can be hard to centralize an audience on Saturdays. The solution is an expansion of scheduling into new days of the week, like Friday and Sunday, and an expanded playoff that capitalizes on cross-conference excitement. 

This season, that expansion paid off, with elite matchups like the programs of Oregon and Ohio State facing off in a Big Ten Conference matchup, resulting in an average of 10.2M P2+ viewers for a regular-season game, not scheduled in isolation, and eerily close to the viewership of the Big Ten Championship this year. The Big Ten Championship sold for close to $850k for a :30 unit as inventory sold out, which was 82% higher than the regular-season primetime windows that were priced in May. 

The “Kickoff Game” is not always the first game of the season, and gone are the days of only having one “Kickoff Game” as the CFB looks to merchandise and isolate high-level matchups:

Based on the performance of these kickoff games, the standalone games performed much better than their corresponding daypart/viewing window on average and broke historical records in viewership and streaming, indicating growth in consumption and insight into where viewers are consuming. It’s important to note that this game was sold both traditionally on ABC and through DAI across ESPN+ and the ESPN App, demonstrating two different ways to reach unique audiences and highlighting how high the collective viewership tallied. 

Although the shift of Power Four and Group of Five conference matchups to Friday nights was initially unpopular with coaches and fans, the move has been wildly successful. It has resulted in a 23% year-over-year increase across all distributors. Fox was one of the greatest beneficiaries of Friday night viewership, with ratings up 20% year over year. 

Black Friday, a newer yet powerful home for live sports, is given its adjacency to the shopping holiday for retail advertisers and its potential for high viewership during holiday time off. Making its biggest impact on college football ever this year, running in isolation from Amazon’s Black Friday game, ABC’s matchup between Georgia and Georgia Tech, a rivalry game that was not highly anticipated, but averaged 8.5 million viewers, peaking at an average viewing of 11.5 million during its eighth overtime period. 

For reference, this year’s most anticipated matchup, Georgia vs. Alabama, averaged 12 million viewers. This game became the second-most-watched game on Black Friday since 2011’s #1 LSU vs. #3 Arkansas, which was the most-watched regular-season game of the year. Black Friday continues to grow as an appointment television date, urging advertisers to capitalize on higher-than-anticipated growth year over year before pricing begins to catch up. 

A New Era: High-Impact Games & New Viewers Trends

This is a new era of college football, one unrecognizable from any previous landscape. It’s been met with some of the highest anticipation of any season in recent history, resulting in a 56% increase in viewership on ABC and a 4% average rating across all distributors. Not only did viewership increase, but new viewers are consuming more college football content, with the daily average unique viewer up 8% year over year on ESPN Digital. 

The top 10 regular season games this year had a median increase in viewership of +6.4% over last year’s most-watched games. The increase can be attributed, in part, to overall viewership growth of the sport, but the most important factor is that three of 2024’s top 10 games were matchups created by this year’s conference realignment: 

One major takeaway is that, while most college football games cannot be bought based on the matchup, the games that are sold individually—like Alabama/Georgia, Army/Navy, and Michigan/Ohio State—generate similar viewership to games like Ohio State/Penn State and Alabama/Tennessee but at much higher unit costs than the selling windows of the latter. Looking ahead to next season, advertisers should evaluate schedules and distribution rights to determine which broadcasters carry the most desired matchups and buy the weeks of those games in their anticipated selling title. 

Expanding the playoffs from the 4-team to 12-team format now provides the CFB with eight more premium matchups in isolation, similar to the NFL format. However, in theory, a larger playoff field de-emphasizes the significance of the conference championship, as the top teams that play in the championship will most likely make the playoffs even if they lose. So far, it hasn’t impacted viewership drastically, as matchups and outcomes can bear the weight of the slight differences year over year, and the MWC Championship has benefited from yet another Friday night viewing success:

As part of the College Football Playoff expansion, the new 12-team playoff created new opportunities for advertisers to air alongside four more standalone, high-level matchups that provide impact and immediacy. First-round games were valued at between 10M and 30M P2+ impressions when sold, increasing in planned viewership as the schedule moves from the Noon to Primetime windows. 

Another new aspect of the 2024-25 CFB TV landscape is having TNT broadcast its first college football games—a hard pivot from its 35-year ownership of NBA rights—which will now offer a brand-new viewing experience of the sport, including its own production and broadcast duos of Mark Jones/Roddy Jones and Dave Pasch/Dusty Dvoracek. This marks TNT’s expedition into new sports distribution rights, as the NBA heads to Amazon and NBC, and will be a small sample of what their broadcasts will look like moving forward.

TNT’s broadcast shared a viewership window with the NFL, namely the Chiefs/Texans and Steelers/Ravens, which averaged 15.5M viewers during the overlapping broadcasts. The impact was demonstrated in the disparity between TNT and Disney’s viewership of the First Round. With no overlap, ABC/ESPN’s coverage was just shy of the NFL’s product in viewership.

On average, the Quarterfinals’ viewership was greater than that of any single first-round game by +16%. Considering the emergency rescheduling of the Sugar Bowl from January 1 to January 2 (Notre Dame/Georgia), the games performed incredibly well despite missing the primetime window on a night reserved for College Football.

When comparing this year’s Semifinal to last year’s Semifinal of a pre-expansion playoff, viewership was down 17% on average year-over-year. This is likely due to two reasons, both related to scheduling. Penn State/Notre Dame was played on a Thursday night (likely to avoid an NFL Saturday), and the previous Semifinals took place on New Year’s Day, a day long associated with postseason College Football. 

At the conclusion of the new College Football Playoff, viewership was down 12% from last year’s Championship (Michigan vs. Washington) but still up 28% from 2023’s matchup of Georgia vs. TCU. The glaring difference between this year’s game and previous years is its congruence with Inauguration Day, likely disrupting normal viewership habits and stealing share from a Monday night free of the NFL.

Advertising Considerations for the 2025 CFB Season

As media buyers and advertisers look ahead to building CFB campaigns in 2025, there are two factors currently being discussed by the NCAA as potential changes that will determine how and when media should be placed in the regular season and postseason, respectively. 

Starting the season one week earlier: In order to avoid NFL Saturdays (scheduling that begins after the new year), the easiest solution would be to shift the regular season start to the second-to-last week of August, pushing Kickoff Games to mid-August. This allows for the National Championship to take place on or before January 10 and protects playoff games from overlapping with other professional sports and events. If this change is made, advertisers should look to capitalize on two full weeks of uninterrupted College Football to start the season, which may be undervalued as many matchups are not as strong in the first three weeks of the season due to out-of-conference scheduling, but may see a boom in viewership due to the lack of congruent sports scheduling during that time.

Restructuring of Playoff seeding: For advertisers looking for high-level placements in the Playoffs or Bowl Season, the College Football Playoff Committee will likely look to seed based on final CFP rankings—not conference championship winners—which means we will likely see greater parity in matchup in First Round and Quarterfinal games. This means that games will be sold rated on last year’s performance, but not accounting for the enhanced matchups. It’s unlikely these changes will occur in 2025, as the current CFP structure is under contract through the year, but if not changed for the upcoming season, it will most likely affect the 2026 season. 

Final Thoughts

As audiences continue to grow younger and more digitally engaged, brands have a unique opportunity to capitalize on new sponsorship models, NIL activations, and targeted media placements across emerging broadcast platforms. The sport’s increasing regionalization, coupled with high-impact matchups, will demand a more strategic approach from advertisers, focusing on premium inventory and appointment viewing opportunities. 

Looking ahead, the continued evolution of scheduling and playoff seeding will further influence how media buyers approach investment in college football, making it critical to anticipate and adapt to these shifts. With unprecedented momentum behind the sport, the next era of college football presents a dynamic and lucrative frontier for advertisers willing to navigate its complexities.