The NFL Reaches Fans and Beyond With “Football Country”

The ‘24-’25 Football season kicks off today so naturally the NFL brings us a blockbuster ad to mark the occasion. As befits the host brand for the single biggest night in American advertising, the NFL are no slouch at ads themselves, regularly showing up in our Top 10 of Super Bowl spots with commercials packed with football superstars. This year was no exception, with a strong spot focused on the brand’s training camps in Africa, and the NFL’s new season ad continues that global theme as the brand gets a shout out from fans from Brazil to Japan.

In fact, diversity is at the heart of “This is Football Country” – we start off with a solemn chant from a Maui team, as the island rebuilds from last year’s devastating wildfires. The ad from agency 72&Sunny also touches on women’s football and wheelchair football before sweeping around the world, with players and fans united in vibrant, hip-hop style chanting. And we end on a hilarious and very relatable note as a family of New York Giants fans reacts in shock when their youngest member pledges her love to the Philadelphia Eagles: a cute moment that helps the ad finish with a smile.

It’s an inspiring, fist-pumping piece of work from the NFL with something for every fan – an ad which underscores the brand’s current efforts to reach out into new audiences and new forms of the game. There’s a flag football star in there too, as the low-contact version of the sport builds an audience ahead of the LA Olympics in 2028.

Like most sports ads, though, “This Is Football Country” is speaking to two different audiences. The brand wants to let casual viewers and people not especially into sports know that the new season is underway. But it particularly wants to get sports fans hyped for the season. So when we came to look at the ad for Test Your Ad, we wanted to get an idea of how it performed with both those populations. We tested it our usual way, among the general public, but also with a separate sports fan sample.

We were on the look out for a Sports Dividend, as detailed in our exclusive research report of the same name, put together in collaboration with Fuse. The Sport Dividend offers a blueprint for brands who are looking to tap into sports fandom and use sports in their work – not just sports brands like the NFL but any brand looking to create ads which appeal to the huge sports fan constituency. The “Sports Dividend” itself is the boost in effectiveness a sports-themed ad enjoys among sports fans. Not every sports ad gets a dividend, but it can radically increase the impact of an ad among that core fan market, and the report details the best ways to achieve that.

In the NFL’s case, the ad is a success beyond the fan audience too, with a very good 3.9-Star score among the general public, showing good potential for the ad to drive long term brand growth. That’s already several notches above the average sports ad, which manages only 2.4-Stars. On short term Spike Rating and Brand Fluency, though, the ad performs more modestly with the public, in line with the average sports brand commercial.

With sports fans themselves, though, all three key Test Your Ad metrics are taken up a level. There’s a 4.4-Star Rating with the fan audience, a Sports Dividend of half a Star; and both Spike and Brand Fluency improve to land above the category average. These results aren’t a shock – you’d predict the NFL to land a Sports Dividend with a strong new season ad and that’s exactly what they do. But it’s a great display of how a brand can speak to fans as well as the general public, touching citizens of Football Country all over America, and the world.