Football ad strategies that score

Why should your next ad campaign be in the football stadium? 

The average NFL regular season game boasts an impressive viewership of around 18.58 million viewers per game across TV and digital channels. This places NFL games in the highest average viewership for all TV programs in the U.S.. 

The Super Bowl is the biggest televised event in U.S. history. Super Bowl 2024 set the record for viewership with over 123.7 average viewers. While Super Bowl LIX in 2025 brought in over $800 million in ad revenue with ads boasting an average ROI of $4.60 per dollar spent. 

For NFL games throughout 2024, 69,520 fans on average attended each game. The Dallas Cowboys racked up the most attendees with an average of 92,972 fans attending each game. 

Whether at home or in the stadium, game day offers brand reach and visibility on an impressive scale. With modern advertising offering high-tech LED boards, impressive augmented-reality-based brand experiences and fan-tailored activations — football stadiums give you the opportunity to target a highly-engaged audience with products and services connected to their favorite players. 

From virtual advertising in football to the different LED boards available in the stadium, in this post, I cover football stadium advertising in more depth, including the most-common types, best practices and how you can measure success. 

Let’s take a look at the main types of football stadium advertising. 

The main types of LED displays

Known for their high visibility, modern LED displays are one of the most popular forms of football stadium advertising. 

Modern LED signs are bright, ultra high definition, full color, and water resistant – delivering season-round visibility. These displays provide an elevated experience compared to static displays, drawing in fans with ads, user-generated content, quizzes and trivia. 

As fans also watch the displays to follow the match and catch replays, this makes them more likely to watch ads than on other channels. Unlike many digital, TV, and audio ads, consumers can’t skip past the ads on LED screens; making them an effective advertising channel for building awareness and engagement. 

LED displays are an effective channel for building brand awareness and engagement, as fans are exposed to several ads during game day. They’re also a great channel for growing brand equity — as consumers start to unconsciously associate their favorite players with the brands on display.  

One of the main types of LED displays are perimeter boards. The first use of perimeter boards dates back to the 1900s. Modern perimeter boards are weather-resistent static advertising signs that are most commonly placed around the field on the sidelines and baselines.

Modern digital perimeter boards are typically fixed displays that show logos, images, graphics, and slogans. This uninterrupted exposure is ideal for improving brand awareness and showing marketing messages during times of peak engagement. 

“With contemporary forms of advertising facing greater and greater challenges in maintaining interest and engagement, the target audience is just waiting to click the ‘Skip’ button. Perimeter advertising offers a unique solution, as a platform which engages with its audience, where their content isn’t interrupted by the ads, but instead seamlessly incorporated alongside it. This provides brands with an unavoidable form of advertising which can work alongside sport, forming an emotional connection.” - Dominic Mills, Sportfive Magazine

Other common types of modern LED advertising signage include Jumbotrons, which are the large LED video walls typically placed at each end of the stadium. These boards often show instant replays, fan cam videos and live game footage alongside ads. 

They typically display dynamic ads featuring a rotation of videos, marketing messages, and animations. Ads are often interspersed with real-time gameplay and replays of the best moments in the game with LED displays supporting brands to sync their ads with specific plays, player introductions and timeouts. 

Modern LEDs deliver high visibility no matter the weather conditions, from fog and rain to bright sunlight. As fans also watch the displays for live footage and replays, placing your ads here will also help to increase brand awareness and recall. 

Ribbon LED displays, often called fascia boards, typically run in between seating levels and along balconies in ribbon fashion. They roll out ads, match updates and prompts to encourage fans engagement.

Virtual advertising in football

Virtual Replacement (sometimes called digital board replacement or digital overlay technology) uses computer vision and augmented reality (AR) technologies to map the dimensions of an in-stadium LED board in order to show different images or videos based on TV and streaming viewers' locations. This means that what the fans see at home is different to what the fans see in the stadium.  

Virtual replacement technology supports region-specific ad targeting, allowing brands to create several different broadcasts that are personalized to viewers' unique locations; tailoring ads based on local languages, currency, culture and products. Beyond delivering more targeted advertising, the tech helps broadcasters comply with local advertising laws, such as local laws that prohibit alcohol and gambling ads. 

While the tech is less common in American football, it’s regularly used by football and soccer teams around the world. Spain's La Ligma uses virtual replacement technology to customize their feeds for their global audience, delivering over 8 customized viewing experiences for different regions, from Central Asia to North America.

In-stadium advertising helps consumers immerse themselves in companies’ brand stories in a way that helps elevate the game experience through a mix of activations, interactive experience, and screen engagements. 

Digital signage helps support activations and interactive fan experiences through big-screen fan cam captures, team trivia, and polls and quizzes. Brands set up dynamic and game-dependent interactions, like using customized animations or shows to celebrate goals. 

Many brands also integrate their in-stadium digital experiences with their social media channels — creating a more immersive, engaging experience for fans across channels and encouraging continual engagement. Brands often incentivize user-generated content and feature social media content like fan-made videos, selfies and posts alongside branded game-day hashtags to drive deeper engagement. 

A killer example of this is Doritos’ Crash The Superbowl campaign. First rolled out by the snack-food brand in 2006, each year Doritos invites fans to go viral and outsmart other sponsors for the most-talked about ads. In 2025, winners Dylan Bradshaw and Nate Norell took home $1 million for their ad Abduction. Check it out:

Brands are also experimenting with technologies that help to deliver more immersive, engaging brand experiences. For their 2023 games, The Los Angeles Rams and Princess Cruises used Snapchat’s augmented reality technology to improve ad engagement on the Ram’s home turf, Sofi Stadium. 

The duo used AR to turn the Rams’ stadium into the Pacific Ocean and featured three Rams’ players surfing on the virtual waves. Players completed an obstacle course of dolphins and swimmers. Beating out their teammates, the winner catches a huge wave atop Princess Cruise’s featured ship. The one-minute ad was rolled out on the SoFi Stadium Infinity Screen and invited in-stadium fans to enter into a competition to win a free seven-day cruise. 

Both inside and on the inner outskirts of the inner stadium, brands continue to get creative with tech-facilitated activations that go beyond static booths and displays. 

For the 2024 Super Bowl, Pepsi created The Vault. The Pepsi Big Game Vault invited fans to come share their “Sip City Secrets,” and craziest Super Bowl stories with Pepsi Zero Sugar Rookie of the Year Finalist Puka Nacua. The Vault delivered a full sensory experience with games, a neon-light-based design and music. Fans were also given the opportunity to win some branded Pepsi and NFL merch. 

You understand the benefits, you understand the tech. Let’s cover best practices when it comes to your in-stadium advertising. 

How to tailor messaging for in-stadium versus broadcast audiences

On game day, you're not advertising to one audience – you're advertising to two. At-home fans need different messaging to your in-stadium audience. 

In the stadium, fans are highly engaged and running off of adrenaline and excitement. You want your messaging to add to the rush and enhance their experience. Capitalize on the emotional momentum to move them further along the customer journey. Give them practical next steps to act on that emotion and enhance their experience — such as QR codes, trivia quizzes, social media contests or promotions for concessions and merch.

At-home audiences are exposed to a higher number of ads for longer, leading to ad saturation faster. To counteract this, get creative. The highest-performing Super Bowl ads typically tap into humor, emotionally driven and out-of-the-box storytelling, and lean into cultural references (think Hellman’s nod to When Harry Met Sally).  

In our report, Lessons in Advertising: Superbowl LIX, we uncovered that : “US ads on average have a Sales Impact score of 50, but this year’s Super Bowl ads achieved a significantly higher average Sales Impact of 72. They were also more distinctive (4.0 vs. 3.8), more emotionally intense (16.5 vs. 15.6) and more humorous than the average US ad (19% laugh reaction vs. 8%).”

If you’re looking for ad inspiration, download our report and line up our post on the best-of-the best ads of Super Bowl LIX to read after this one. 

For broadcast ads, targeting is key. Use virtual replacement perimeter advertising to overlay geo-targeted messages for each feed to localize your ads to your audience. 

It’s essential to centralize your data, break down silos, and make sure you can clearly track consumers’ customer journeys across channels — from their smartphone to the stadium and every channel in between. 

Josh Rabenovets, Vice President of Fan Engagement and Product Marketing for the NFL, explains what this looks like on the NFL side:

"One of the biggest hurdles was breaking down data silos across the NFL ecosystem and ensuring every touchpoint connects into one seamless journey. Fans don’t see silos; they see one NFL. Whether buying a ticket, streaming a game or following a team on social media, we had to connect these entry points and unify what we know about each fan. By connecting our data and marketing tools in a single ecosystem, we can now power true fan-centric journey orchestration: real-time personalisation and decision-making across channels."

Connecting your touch points and data points and making this data centralized and easily accessible is equally important on the brand side. You need a holistic view of consumers so that you can personalize your advertising effectively and make sure you deliver exactly what each prospect needs to move along the customer journey and become a brand advocate. 

For consumer research and ad testing, Zappi delivers a centralized, user friendly, AI-based platform to centralize your insights on consumers and ads across channels — so you can test, collect, analyze and store all your consumer data in a single platform. 

Great ads don't need to be complicated. Readability, emotional impact and brand consistency are essential for increasing visibility and retention. 

During a busy game, fans are fixed on the match. Don't compete for their attention. Use high-contrast color pairings, short and easy-to-follow videos and animations, clear font, and maintain color and logo consistency across placements. 

In our recent report on the State of Creative Effectiveness, we found that emotional appeal is the biggest driver of advertising likes for consumers. To tap into that essential emotional component, use emotion-driven copy and imagery – leaning heavily into game colors, humor and the excitement of the game to engage consumers and improve messaging recall. 

To find out more about how emotions impact the likelihood of successful ad campaign head here.

Here are some of the best performance metrics to use to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns: 

1. Impressions (total viewership):

This metric helps you measure the total scale of exposure. To calculate add:  

In-stadium attendance + broadcast viewership (TV ratings) + streaming viewership

2. Broadcast exposure:

This metric is essential for helping you measure ad visibility across TV channels and streams. This metric requires the support of dedicated media monitoring tools, such as AI-based computer vision which uses AI to recognize people, patterns, and objects, to track and measure the total seconds and quality of screen time the ad gets when it's on-air.

3. Brand lift:

Brand lift is an important metric for giving you insights into how your advertising impacts fans, allowing you to identify shifts in brand perception and sentiment. The best way to track brand lift is to roll out incentivized pre-exposure and post-exposure surveys with a dedicated tool like Zappi to find out more from fans about how your campaigns impacted things like brand awareness, recall and favorability. 

Survey bias is one of the biggest factors undermining the reliability of your survey results. Read up on how to combat it here. 

4. Cost per thousand impressions (CPM):

This metric tells you the cost for an ad to be shown 1,000 times — helping you quantify the cost-effectiveness of your campaign. To measure add: 

In-stadium attendance + broadcast viewership + streaming viewership

It’s important to connect in-stadium visibility to your digital outcomes. Many fans' customer journeys may start on game day —  but how do you influence and track what they do next? You want to capitalize on game-day excitement and the high levels of brand awareness and engagement that come with viewing your ads in the stadium. 

To help support the next step in a fan's customer journey, add QR codes tied to a unique hashtag or offer to your displays and send users to a landing page or your social media feeds. QR codes help support the transition from in-stadium to online and allow you to easily track engagement via scan CTRs.  

Another way to measure the effectiveness of your in-stadium advertising is to track increases in brand search lift. Are fans searching for your brand or product on Google during or right after the game? Social listening tools are an effective way to do this. You can use time stamping to track mentions before, during and after a game. 

Football advertising will continue to move towards more digital, interactive and personalized content. We'll see virtual and augmented ad formats more and more; LED boards, geo-targeted broadcasts, tech-powered activations and augmented reality will continue to enhance game day and build brand awareness, equity, and engagement with fans. 

Leagues are bringing together first-party fan data from across channels and giving brands access to essential information on consumer buying behavior and sentiment. They’ll continue to share anonymized data with brands, helping brands more effectively personalize their ads with best-fit offers, messaging and products. 

To understand how to effectively nurture fans both inside of and beyond the stadium, brands will focus on tracking and centralizing fan transaction history, real-time location data and in-venue purchasing points. This will give them a holistic view of consumers — helping them to understand fan preferences, behavior, and engagement levels and reflect this in their ad choices.